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THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 



THE JOKE 
ABOUT HOUSING 



BY 



CHARLES HARRIS WHITAKER 




BOSTON 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

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COPYRIGHT -1920 
BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 



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THE • PLIMPTON • PK£SS*NORWOOD • MASS • U'S-A 



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PREFACE 

IN THE summer of 1917, when the hous- 
ing problem had attained nation-wide 
prominence in the United States, and 
when rumbhngs of the oncoming disaster, 
in the shape of an acute shortage of houses 
in the United States, were plainly audible. 
The Journal of the American Institute of 
Architects and the Ladies Home Journal 
joined in holding a competition for "The 
Best Solution of the Housing Problem." 
The terms of the competition were unique 
and provided for the submission of two 
written theses, one upon the social purpose 
which any solution should seek to accom- 
plish, and the other upon the economic 
method by which such a solution could be 
accomplished. In addition to these require- 
ments there was a third, which embraced a 
simple drawing of the physical plan that 
should illustrate the application of the prin- 
ciples set forth in the two theses. 

The competition was open to all citizens 
of the United States and Canada, and the 



PREFACE 

jury was as follows: Thomas R. Kimball, 
President of the American Institute of 
Architects , Chairman, Omaha; Louis F. 
Post, Assistant Secretary, Department of 
Labor, Washington; Thomas Adams, Town 
Planning Adviser, Commission on Conser- 
vation, Ottawa, Canada; Herbert Quick, 
Farm Loan Board, Washington; Lawson 
Purdy, Chairman Committee on New In- 
dustrial Towns, New York ; James Sullivan, 
Representative of the American Federation 
of Labor on the Council of National De- 
fense, Washington;* Edith Elmer Wood, 
Writer on and Student of Housing Prob- 
lems, Philadelphia ; Frederick L. Ackerman, 
Architect, New York; Milton B. Medary, 
Jr., Architect, Philadelphia. 

Due to the arduous task imposed upon 
the jury, which involved the reading of all 
the manuscripts submitted (about forty) , the 
award of the prizes was not made until May 
1919. The first prize was $1,000, but due 
to the fact that neither of the two winning 
theses was supplemented by drawings which 
the jury considered to be adequate, no first 
prize was awarded. Instead, the jury 
awarded two second prizes of $500 each, one 

* Mr. Sullivan did not participate in the award, owing 
to absence in Europe. 

Cvi] 



PREFACE 

to Robert Anderson Pope and one to Milo 
Hastings, both of New York City. But this 
award should not in any way militate against 
the quality of the winning theses. Each em- 
bodied a fundamental plan around which 
qualified experts can construct a physical 
community- Both of the winning theses are 
published as an appendix to this volume, 
which is itself an effort to clear up the basic 
questions involved in the housing problem 
and to put an end, insofar as possible, to so 
much hasty and loose thinking on so vital a 
subject. 

The author asks the indulgence of his 
readers in the use of certain figures and sta- 
tistics previously published in "The Housing 
Problem in War and in Peace" ; they seem 
too forceful and pertinent to be omitted. 



[vii] 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAOB 

I. Why do we have Houses ? . . . . 1 
II. The House and the Home — A 

World Problem 17 

III. Houses and Wages 37 

IV. The Employer and the Housing 

Question 66 

V. The Two Plants 84 

VI. What are the Possible Ways out of 

THE Dilemma in Housing ? ... 96 
VII. The General Problem of Land 

Control 113 

VIII. What to do 155 

Appendix A 169 

Appendix B 174 

Appendix C 178 

Appendix D 206 



Ck] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

I 

WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

IF WE ask why we have houses and an- 
swer by saying that they are for humans 
to Hve in, we seem to have stated a very 
familiar condition which required neither 
question nor answer. But what do we mean 
by "live" ? That is the real question and one 
not to be either easily or lightly answered. 
Existence is one thing, living is another. 
Existence implies an indefinite state of 
merely being and keeping alive. Living im- 
plies growth, and a house is therefore some- 
thing in which people not only live, but in 
which they should have a fair chance to 
grow. 

How to grow? Just taller and larger, as 
children grow? Or do we mean that they 
are to grow finer, more intelligent, more 
loyal to principle, more fearless in the pur- 
suit of justice and fairness? Unfortunately 

[1] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

we have not meant that when we have dis- 
cussed the lives of a great many hundreds of 
thousands of workers in the United States, 
We have been interested quite wholly in 
their houses as a kind of machine which 
added to their physical ability to perform 
labor under conditions often menial, often 
degrading, often perilous, and too fre- 
quently bearing diseases that sometimes 
cripple, and sometimes kill. 

But what of the House? What kind of a 
structure is it to be? How shall it be built 
and arranged so that the progress of life 
growth may proceed without being choked 
and starved by lack of air and sun, by con- 
ditions of crowding which are not only phys- 
ically unhealthy but which, through lack of 
privacy, compel a living condition amount- 
ing to indecency in the human relation. How 
shall we provide houses where there will be 
no insanitary rooms, no dark stairways, 
dirty courts, filthy back yards and even 
streets; and more than that where life shall 
actually be encouraged and stimulated to 
grow and be influenced by the sense of some- 
thing that physical possession alone cannot 
give. 

We do not want houses to be handed out 
by any paternalistic agency, in order that we 

[2] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

may collect a certain number of humans and 
arrange them neatly in these rows of dwell- 
ings, in the full belief that they ought to stay 
put and be content, because we ourselves 
have become contented with the appearance 
of these little rows of houses. They satisfy 
our architectural sense. They do not disturb 
our vision as unsightly houses do. They 
have pleasing roof -lines, quaint gable-ends, 
charming little porches, a bit of garden with 
a walk, and the chimneys content the eye as 
they shoot up above the roof line, in good 
proportion. All of these things are very 
pleasant, but whether the man owns or rents 
these architectural perfections does not 
matter. What does matter is whether he is 
living a life within one of those houses which 
stimulates him to hallow the premises with 
something beyond the thought of possession 
and ownership. 

We wish him to become such a part of 
that house that his individuality leaves an 
impression, and we wish that individuality 
to be the kind that will leave a desirable im- 
pression. It is folly to think that art, even 
in the shape of a house, is a thing to be 
handed out all finished, like a mausoleum. 
A house is a thing to be lived in, to be con- 
tinually and newly adorned, to be beautified 

[3] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

by continual enrichments, and thus to grow 
old with dignity and to be a symbol of some- 
thing beside a title-deed. If we do not wish 
houses to serve these purposes, when we 
build them, then we have lost the whole spirit 
and tradition of architecture, which did not 
begin by the process of having one group, 
calling itself superior, hand out something 
to another group which was called inferior. 
Architecture began by the humble process 
of building and of finding beauty through 
experience. It was wholly detached from a 
conscious process of taking a man's measure 
for a house as one would for a suit of clothes. 
The house grew, often by slow stages, just 
as cathedrals grew, and in that process of 
growing both left something which we are 
never tired of beholding. 

The picturesqueness of European coun- 
trysides was not attained by architects 
struggling over drawing boards. It was at- 
tained by people who possessed the love and 
knowledge of how to build with good pro- 
portion, with certain traditional charms of 
detail, and, above all, with a certain spiri- 
tual perception of the dignity and beauty 
that are possible in building and that should 
always be sought, even in the humblest struc- 
ture. Is it not something of that which we 

[ 4 ] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

would like to see revived as a part of our 
national life? While we waste our effort in 
discussing means for ''educating the public," 
and for bringing about an appreciation of 
art, let us remember that the greatest mis- 
sion of art is to bless him who creates, and 
not him who enjoys the creation afterwards. 
It is in the creation of art that men are made 
rich. Men may possess untold treasures of 
art, and yet be in abject creative poverty. 

It is of this sort of house that one would 
like to write, strive for, and so bring back to 
our land something of the charm of do- 
mestic architecture that once it had. Per- 
haps the time is coming when we shall, 
through cooperative effort, much reduce the 
labor of keeping house, and then it will be 
more important than ever that we surround 
the home with possibilities for the enrich- 
ment of life. It is time to think seriously of 
these things, and to take notice of the exist- 
ence to which so large a part of our workers 
is condemned. ''These things do not stand 
still." 

It is true that of late years, there has been 
a half-hearted perception by a few people 
that such an existence, or such a life as was 
led by the great multitude of our workers 
and their wives and families, was not only 

[ 5 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

a great financial loss to the nation, but a 
source of great possible evil to government. 
Yet most of these perceptions were based 
upon definite industrial factors having to do 
with labor turnover (meaning that work- 
men were continually changing from one 
employer to another, entailing heavy ex- 
pense to the employer in constantly teaching 
new men), labor shortage, labor unrest, and 
a generally disturbed condition in the re- 
lation between employer and employee. 
Vaguely, it became realizable that there was 
a very definite relation between both the 
quality and the quantity of workmanship 
in a factory and the living conditions of the 
workman when he was at home. Thus, there 
came a more or less vague recognition of the 
value of a good house for the workman. If 
it were owned by the occupant, so much the 
better, it was thought, for then it was be- 
lieved that it would act as a measure of sta- 
bilizing what is called labor which would 
mean an end of labor turnover. Besides that 
it was thought that it would also have the 
effect of maintaining a permanent and ade- 
quate supply of workers. (This form of 
himian activity thoughtlessly has been al- 
lowed to drift into the class of commodities, 
for when we now speak of labor we do not 

[ 6] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

stop to think that we are talking of men and 
women, sometimes children, and that they 
all have bodies and souls, and human aspira- 
tions toward bettering their condition.) But 
for one of these reasons or another, many- 
industries have undertaken the building of 
houses for their workmen. No doubt some 
of them were actuated by broad considera- 
tions of health and welfare, as far separated 
from any thought of labor-control (that is, 
of being able to control workmen by either 
selling them a house on easy payments, or of 
renting them a house as part of their wage) 
as possible. Yet the fact remains that there 
are few, if any, really successful housing un- 
dertakings of this kind to be found in the 
United States. No matter how really sin- 
cere may have been the motive which 
prompted such operations, they cannot fail 
to encounter the aversion of the worker from 
the ownership of a home, except under very 
favorable circumstances, and where owner- 
ship does not require him to forfeit his eco- 
nomic freedom and make him dependent 
upon one employer. 

Workmen, organized or unorganized, rec- 
ognize the purchase of a house as giving 
hostage to freedom. Its possession, in any 
city or town where they are dependent upon 

[ 7 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

a limited possibility for employment, sets 
up a timidity in the face of what they may 
believe to be an injustice in any form, and 
puts the workman at a disadvantage in ne- 
gotiating, whether singly or in groups, for 
whatever betterment he may wish to con- 
tend. Men will go far in supporting in- 
justice, or in tolerating what they believe to 
be an economic wrong, ere they will hazard 
their savings which have been put into a 
house. This is the psychology which governs 
industrial housing undertakings carried on 
by manufacturers. In whatever guise they 
are put forward — no matter how attractive 
the terms under which they are offered — 
the wise workman turns away his head. He 
has learned by experience that freedom of 
action is vastly more desirable than to sur- 
render to the steadily and regretfully re- 
pressed yearning to own a home. There may 
be exceptions, but they are rare, and one 
may well doubt their permanence. 

In his Chapter on "What is a House?" 
in "The Housing Problem in War and in 
Peace,'' * Mr. Richard S. Childs says: "The 
attempt of manufacturers to sell houses and 



* "The Housing Problem in War and in Peace," by 
Charles Harris Whitaker and others. The Journal of the 
American Institute of Architects, Washington, D. C, 1917. 

[ 8 ] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

lots to employees on easy terms or otherwise 
is, from labor's standpoint, not generous but 
positively sinister. Except in towns where 
there is great diversity of employment, the 
effect is to tie the worker to the millowner 
like a feudal peasant to his lord. It inter- 
feres with the mobility of labor. As the 
Welfare Director of a large company en- 
thusiastically explained to me, 'Get them t&\ 
invest their savings in their homes and own 1 
them. Then they won't leave and they won't 
strike. It ties them down so they have a 
stake in our prosperity.' Another informant 
commented on the labor troubles that 
brought about the permanent dismantling of 
a certain old plant in a New England vil- 
lage. 'These fool workers !' he said. 'There 
a lot of them had invested the savings of \ 
years in their homes and then had to sell out 
for a song and move elsewhere. That's / 
what they got for quarreling with their 
bread and butter !' " 

The alternative to this, in isolated dis- 
tricts or places where there is but one in- 
dustry to support the town or village, is for 
the manufacturer to build houses for rental 
to his workmen, but simple and logical as 
such a plan seems at first glance, it is never 
satisfactory. The houses are likely to re- 

[ 9 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

ceive indifferent care. The workman sus- 
pects that the rental is a part of whatever 
injustice he may feel himself to be enduring. 
To the employer, the cost of upkeep is high, 
and the interest on the investment low. 
There is no collateral return to him in the 
form of stabiUty of supply of workers. They 
feel themselves as free to leave these houses 
as to leave any other. Such homes have no 
value, sentimental or real. They are merely 
stepping-stones or resting places in the 
struggle for human betterment which is one 
of the cardinal rights and principles of de- 
mocracy. 

What a curious blind alley we now find 
ourselves in! Those workmen who would 
like to own a home of their own and settle 
down (most of them would) are prevented 
from doing so through the fear that it will 
hamper their freedom of action. The em- 
ployer, who has every reason for seeing his 
workers comfortably and contentedly housed 
in homes of their own, cannot in any way aid 
to this desirable end, because his motives 
are suspected from the start. The commu- 
nity, which has everything to gain from the 
steady upbuilding of good homes, is de- 
prived of both the moral and the material 
benefit thereof . It is the same with the na- 
[ 10 ] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

tion. All are sacrificed to this condition. 
All suffer an immeasurable loss. 

It is, of course, true that house ownership 
imposes a limitation on the freedom of action 
of men in all callings. In the face of oppor- 
tunity a man hesitates to make the sacrifice 
entailed by the sale of his house. Some- 
times, under fortunate circumstances, it can 
be sold at a profit. This is rare, although 
the usual loss falls less and less heavily as 
we ascend from the wage-earning to the 
salaried or income-receiving class. It falls 
heaviest of all on the low- wage worker, who 
is often referred to as the unskilled. 

Pursuing this thought to the uttermost, 
however, it might be said that no man should 
hamper himself by owning a house, but that 
the state should provide houses for rentals, 
so that all men could be free to move when- 
ever they found a better position ; and with- 
out risk of loss on the house they had bought. 
The real answer, however, is for the state to 
put an end to the frightful waste involved in 
our present riotous development of land, and 
thus make the house a stable element of our 
national life, free from the destructive ef- 
fects of speculation in land which forces 
speculation in building and which always 
brings communal disaster in its train. If, 

[ 11 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

in the face of these facts, we ask, ''What is 
a house?" we are obliged to answer that for 
the great majority who work for wages or 
salaries, it is a shuttlecock flying back and 
forth between the battledores of the manu- 
facturer, the workman, the speculator, and 
the community. 

Yet the house, as the framework of the 
home, is the backbone of our economic struc- 
ture and of our physical and moral structure 
as well. Shall we now recognize this fact? 
Or will our housing reformers continue their 
hopeless struggle with plans for all the 
various ways and means that have so far 
been invented for compressing life into 
smaller and smaller quarters? Or offer tem- 
porary cures and patent remedies in the 
shape of standardized, machine-made struc- 
tures to be built by the mile and sold by the 
yard? Or will there arise a new and more 
fundamental philosophy of the house and the 
home — a philosophy that is more sadly 
needed than any other? 

Surely human ingenuity cannot proceed 
much further in distorting the dwelling- 
place into structures possessing less of the 
atmosphere of home than the flats, tenements 
and four-deckers, which, jerry built and 
doomed to increase the fire and the death 

[ 12 ] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

risk more and more, have sprung up like 
mushrooms throughout the length and 
breadth of our land. It is idle to tell us that 
this is the cheapest way in which the world 
can be housed. The process has had but one 
effect — as far as money has been concerned 

— for it has steadily diminished the amount 
of house value that one can buy or rent for 
a dollar. And there is also plenty of evi- 
dence to make us believe that the people who 
live in these substitute houses, are growing 
not finer, but coarser. 

There are no definite types of houses 
which will satisfy all. That is not the prob- 
lem. The great question is this: In what 
manner can we so house all our workers, no 
matter whether they are clerks or masons or 
teamsters, as to develop men and women 
able to play their full part with the greatest 
advantage to world-progress and human 
betterment. 

This is not a question of sentimental value 

— it is an economic question which must be 
solved, because the national economic struc- 
tures of the future will have to depend upon 
better workers better housed. To ignore 
that will be to put the United States at a 
colossal disadvantage when the economic 
structure of our country begins to deal with 

[ 13 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

the payment of interest and the capital 
which has gone into War. 

We know that today no desirable part was 
played in our wartime necessity by those 
who lived under the conditions obtaining in 
most of our tenements and in the vast slum 
areas created by the abandonment of locali- 
ties that were once prosperous. Many of 
them were rejected by the Army, and were 
also found to be poor workers at anything. 
We have found through War that victory 
was a question not alone of men, but of in- 
dustrial organization that would back up the 
men. But our national hfe is today just as 
dependent upon the skill with which we can 
organize our industry as it was in war, and 
in the vision war gave us we saw that the 
health and vitality of our workers were ab- 
solute precedents both to industrial organi- 
zation and to the strength of our army. We 
must now remember the lesson. It was the 
Whole Welfare which suddenly became il- 
lumined in the red light of War! It must 
not be allowed to darken in the light of 
Peace. 

Germany foresaw these things, because 
she had treated the question of houses as a 
scientific factor in pre-war preparations. 
England learned them by bitter experience, 

[ 1* ] 



WHY DO WE HAVE HOUSES? 

because she went to war as one of the worst 
housed nations in the world. We had to 
learn the lesson wherever our industries were 
straining at the giant task ahead of them. 
We did not by any means solve the problem, 
but the effort has at least quickened our in- 
telligence. The house has become one of the 
most important factors in our national life, 
for we have not enough houses to shelter our 
population ; rents have risen to a point where 
they are hardly payable, and still we have 
thousands and thousands of our people 
living in houses which ought to be pulled 
down and thrown on the scrap heap. But 
soon, let us hope, we shall cease with the 
word ''housing," as one which implies the 
reluctant recognition of a necessity to be 
dealt with in the form of charity, supplant- 
ing it with a word which indicates our fear- 
less acceptance of the human right of all 
people to a decent shelter. The word 
''housing" smells of handing out shelter as 
we hand out soup. It is time to drop it and 
begin to talk not of the house but of the 
home, as our ultimate measure of progress, 
reflecting the character of a nation made 
strong through reconsecration to the prin- 
ciple of democracy. The good house will 
then be reflected in the homes and lives of 
[ 15 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

its people as the most desirable physical pos- 
session for which nations can encourage men 
to struggle. 

Upon such structures will rise the eco- 
nomic machine of the future. In our blind 
struggle for profit, the home has been lost to 
sight, except as another element of the com- 
petitive system — something to be governed 
not by the laws of human need, but by those 
of human greed. 



[ 16 ] 



II 

THE HOUSE AND THE HOME — 
A WORLD PROBLEM 

THE question of "housing" (the word 
is used with reluctance and only be- 
cause none other seems to have been 
found) is before the world today as never 
before. In England, where the problem has 
been growing more and more serious for al- 
most a century, the present housing crisis is 
recognized as momentous. The English 
newspapers and periodicals are devoting 
columns, daily and weekly, to a recital of the 
gravity of the situation and to a discussion 
of the measures of relief provided by the new 
Housing Act of Parliament. Even a most 
hasty investigation will indicate the extent 
of the problem in other countries. Quite 
aside from the general reconstruction prob- 
lem in France, the recent report of the Office 
des Habitations a Bon Marche (Office of 
Cheap Dwellings; Department de la Seine) 
revealed the housing disaster that has over- 

[ 17 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

taken Paris. The new Soldiers' War Ser- 
vice Homes Act of Australia, although 
based on an extension of the already estab- 
lished governmental principle of lending 
money from the federal treasury as an aid 
to home-building, likewise tells the story of 
congestion and slums in that far-away and 
comparatively new country. The appropri- 
ation of $25,000,000 by the Government of 
Canada to be utilized in stimulating the 
building of houses is but another recognition 
of the grave situation that has everywhere 
been produced by lack of control in restrict- 
ing land and building speculation, two mi- 
crobes that are the deadly, ever festering 
enemy of organized industry whether on the 
farm or in the shop, whether in town or in 
the country, in all lands. Relentless, merci- 
less, protected by law and tradition, their 
appetite is never assuaged. The fatter they 
grow, the more devouring they become. An 
unprejudiced study of the havoc they have 
already wrought forces one to believe, willy 
nilly, that they have brought civilization to 
a point where it is faced with an ominous 
disaster. 

It is perhaps safe to state that in the 
United States, the question of housing our 
unhoused and badly housed millions, is 
[ 18 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

slowly gaining that amount of attention 
which it has long been denied. More than 
that, the problem is beginning to be seen, as 
never before, as one that cannot be studied 
in isolation, for it is vitally related to our 
whole economic system. It is not a prob- 
lem of just building houses, or a question of 
what kind of houses, or what sizes and units. 
It is an economic question profoundly af- 
fecting our whole life as a nation, and like- 
wise profoundly affected by all the factors 
that go to make up our national life. 

The problem has put on new garments, 
not only in Old Europe but in New 
America. Here, the war forced us to take 
it from the cradle as a puny, sickly infant 
called ''Housing," where it had long been 
coddled and swaddled by charity and phil- 
anthropy as a strange case of economic dis- 
ease which no one seemed to understand and 
over the symptoms of which there were very 
learned conferences and discussions, filling 
hundreds of volumes, by the housing re- 
formers, who passed as a wise race of su- 
perior men. Then came the world war, and 
as if by magic the sickly weakling shot up 
into a child that walked on its own feet. 
Both England and the United States were 
obliged to recognize the child and the things 
[ 19 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

that it said, and spend several hundred 
million dollars in building decent homes for 
workmen in order to get an adequate pro- 
duction of war material. 

With national existence hanging in the 
balance, and with a highly organized enemy 
at the throat, the relation between good 
houses and a decent environment to quantity 
production was clearly established and be- 
came visible to the naked eye of even the 
most conservative manufacturer. During 
the last ten or twenty years, in the United 
States, there has been dawning a general 
perception of the fact that such a relation- 
ship did exist, and many manufacturers have 
tried to establish housing and environ- 
mental conditions which would afford satis- 
faction to the workers in their industries. 
But the war evolved a glaring illustration of 
the losses that result from bad housing and 
a dreary environment. 

To build ships we had to have plants. To 
build plants we had to have men. To run 
plants we had to have men. Yet, quite in 
keeping with our usual attitude of the past, 
nobody seemed to pay the slightest attention 
to the fact that men have to live, and that the 
chief mechanism in living is a house. We 
spent millions upon millions on plants, pre- 
[ 20 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

paratory to the establishment of a scale of 
production that would enable us to over- 
whelm our enemy, and then discovered that 
there were no houses available in which the 
workers in those plants could live. We did 
not think of sending an army to the front 
without an equipment, but we never thought 
of providing a living equipment, for our 
workers, as a part of the plant problem ; we 
never have done so, but have left the prob- 
lem to chance and the speculative builder. 

What happened? Our labor overturn in 
the war industries rose to an incredible fig- 
ure. Thousands of workers roamed from 
plant to plant, seeking a home for them- 
selves, or for their families from whom they 
could not afford to be separated. The cost 
of all this in direct expenditure ran into the 
hundreds of millions. Indirectly, through 
delays in making the needed equipment for 
the army, there was another heavy bill of 
costs to pay — and all because, as a nation, 
we have never regarded it as necessary to 
interest ourselves in the housing of work- 
men and their families. We have left that 
problem to private initiative and private 
capital. Under the stress of war both 
turned tail on the problem and ran for cover. 
They would not put their money into houses 
[21 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

when the prospects of loss were so plainly to 
be seen. Prices of building were high, and 
steadily mounting. The future was uncer- 
tain. Housing investments were out of the 
question. 

A wise and experienced government 
would have foreseen such an issue, but gov- 
ernments never become wise and experienced 
in these matters, because they only reflect 
the popular conception and attitude. Thus 
in our War and Navy Departments, where 
contracts for millions and even billions of 
war materials were being given out, where 
new factories were subsidized, old ones were 
ordered enlarged, and the whole mechanism 
of production was being stimulated by the 
apparently endless golden stream that 
flowed forth from the national treasury, no 
thought was given to the living conditions of 
the workmen who were, after all, the vital 
cog in the whole system. Thus we began 
with bunk-houses, with tents, freight cars, 
and by the old process of squeezing several 
people into rooms that were never large 
enough for one. Rooms rose to fabulous 
prices. House rents went soaring. Thou- 
sands of men even paid for the right to oc- 
cupy a bed during eight hours, surrendering 
it at the end of that period to another, who 
[ 22 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

in his turn surrendered it to a third. Never 
did beds return such dividends. 

Result, a slowing down of production. 
General discovery that men cannot work if 
they cannot sleep and have a decent place in 
which to pass their non-working hours. 
There were threats of labor conscription. 
The old-line employers and the newly made 
army officials saw no answer to their prob- 
lem except to conscript labor and make it 
work and live as the government chose. 
Fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed. To 
those who maintained that if a soldier could 
go to war and live in a tent, or sleep in a 
shell-hole, workmen ought not to complain 
at bunk-houses and an eight-hour turn in a 
bed, it was finally made plain that the war 
problem was solely a question of getting pro- 
duction. That production depended upon 
men who had a night's rest, decent food, and 
a chance for some kind of recreation. Also 
that there was quite a difference between the 
soldier and the workman, inasmuch as the 
soldier had to be inured to war conditions as 
a part of the business of war, while the 
workman had quite a different trade to 
follow. Also, that soldiers left their wives 
and families at home and did not have 
to share their tents and shell-holes with 
[ 23 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

them, while workmen had to stay with their 
wives and families, who, in their turn, had 
to share the lot of the family provider. 

Then, again, the war had the effect of pro- 
viding a standard of measurement such as 
we had not hitherto possessed. It has always 
been known, although very often not ad- 
mitted by the employing class, that bad 
housing conditions impose a loss on the pro- 
duction process. But this loss was men- 
tioned as a vague and indeterminate factor, 
and it was generally taken for granted that 
the supply of human beings would somehow 
or other be maintained and that there would 
be no difficulty in replacing those who per- 
ished in such large numbers under the silent 
assault of tuberculosis and the industrial dis- 
eases engendered by bad plant and living 
conditions. Besides, this loss could easily be 
charged to the cost of production and thus 
be paid by the consumer. But in war there 
came a sort of national perception of what 
the cost might be. The fate of the nation was 
at stake. It was no longer a question of 
dollars and cents. It was a question of the 
lives and property of all, and of course under 
such a threat, we were willing to admit the 
necessity of building workmen's houses, as 
a national duty. 

[ 24 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

Unfortunately, the task of meeting this 
necessity fell at first into the most incompe- 
tent hands, and the history of our war-time 
house building under governmental ad- 
ministration, does not encourage us to be- 
lieve that any solution of the problem will 
be found in that direction. On the other 
hand, for the reasons which lie at the base of 
the question, it will be shown later that the 
Government is utterly powerless in this 
matter, for it is faced with an enemy which 
it cannot yet bring to bay and conquer. The 
people of the United States are not yet 
ready for such a battle, although it cannot 
be avoided, when they understand the nature 
of that enemy. 

The war housing experience of England 
was enlightening, and it is beyond dispute 
that the millions spent by our ally in build- 
ing thousands and thousands of decent 
houses for the workers in her war industries, 
saved thousands and thousands of lives. 
Houses, in England, helped to shorten the 
war, by contributing to an ever increasing 
quantity production of munitions. Indeed, 
it might be safe to say that if England had 
not recognized the dire consequences of try- 
ing to manufacture munitions under the old 
conditions of slums and congestion, light- 
[ 25 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

less and airless rooms, and the deadly mo- 
notony of ugly streets and repellant bare 
walls, the Allies would have had a much 
harder task on their hands. England's final 
tremendous munitions production was 
largely due to the fact that she made her 
workers produce more than ever before 
simply by giving them a larger measure of 
rest, comfort, sanitation and pleasurable en- 
vironment, than she had ever given them 
before. 

Let us not forget the part that England's 
housing operations played in shortening the 
duration of the war, with the resulting 
saving of life and materials. Let us also re- 
member to look with regret upon the long 
delays, due to ignorance and incompetence, 
in getting our own housing program under 
way. Except for the work done by the Ord- 
nance Department, all our millions spent on 
housing, during the war, contributed almost 
nothing to an increase in munitions produc- 
tion, and no great amount to our knowledge 
of how really to meet and solve the problem. 

Today the attention of a large part of the 
world is directed to the housing problem. 
The puny child has grown to a youth, strong 
if not robust. It has won its way into the 
parliaments of men. The King discoursed 
[ 26 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

of housing in his speech from the throne of 
England. The Congress of the United 
States has discussed it, and will discuss it 
again. State Legislatures are opening their 
doors to let it enter as a matter of course. 
Europe, not alone in her devastated areas, 
must rehouse millions of her population. 
The youth is rapidly becoming a man. The 
housing question will not down, nor will it 
be content with the palliatives of the past. 

As a problem it is as old as the hills. Most 
of the great nations have been on a quest for 
a solution. Every kind of plan has been 
tried, except the one that will really pro- 
vide a cure (although the latter has been 
tried, on a small scale, in several countries, 
as will later be shown) and so large a store 
of world experience is now available, and so 
conclusive a deduction is now forced upon 
the attention of any sincere investigator, that 
it seems both incredible and pathetic to find 
England still refusing to grapple with the 
roots of the cancer with which she has so 
long contended. Equally pathetic does it 
seem to hear well-meaning citizens in the 
United States advocate principles, the fu- 
tility of which is glaringly evident, if one 
will but take the trouble to look. Many of 
the eleventh hour suggestions, now that the 
[27 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

crisis has become acute, are based upon State 
or Municipal loans for building houses, at 
low rates of interest. It seems to be thought 
that plenty of money will provide a quick 
and easy cure, yet nation after nation has 
tried such a plan, with very low rates of in- 
terest, only to discover that it was just a 
form of temporary relief and no cure at 
all, since a silent, yet all-devouring monster, 
ate up every benefit conferred. Germany, 
one of the first of the nations to discover and 
to expose this monster, sought to check his 
destructive appetite by having her towns 
and cities acquire the vacant land in their 
areas, so that as the value of the land rose, 
the profit would revert to the community 
and not to the individual, for the name of 
the monster is Land Speculation. Far-away 
Australia and New Zealand tried the same 
plan, nationally, by buying up thousands of 
acres of land and holding it for the future. 
England, through the efforts of private 
capital, started Garden Cities, some of which 
were owned on the cooperative principle, 
thus preserving the profit on the rise in 
value of such land, or land increments, as 
these profits are called, to the stockholders, 
who were the tenants. Everywhere one 
turns, one is met with the fact that all na- 
[28] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

tions have finally been forced to seek some 
kind of scheme for defeating the destruction 
wrought upon housing by the private ap- 
propriation of land increments. 

Land speculation is not confined to any 
class. The greedy rich are no more to be 
condenmed than the greedy poor. Every- 
body who buys land wants it to increase in 
value, so that he can get rich out of the im- 
eamed increments, for of course they are 
imearned, as the owner of the land does 
nothing but sit and wait for the land to grow 
more valuable. Thus the germ of acquiring 
benefits from land increments lies deep in 
our national life. The germ of land owner- 
ship lies equally deep. There is nothing to 
prove that those who do not own land would 
be any less selfish, were positions to be 
changed. Landlordism does not differ ma- 
terially with the landlord, since it is bound 
to play the game according to the rules, or 
else lose. On the other hand, the steady 
growth of landlordism and the steady dimi- 
nution of home ownership in the United 
States are problems now seen to be big with 
significance. They indicate, unfortunately, 
that a democratic form of government will 
not avert such evils in housing, such con- 
gestion and slums, as we find in Europe. 
[ 29 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

Our own conditions are equally bad. We, 
like England, can no longer build decent 
houses at a low rental, and have them return 
an interest that would be considered as fair, 
on the investment. Having borrowed our 
land and economic system from Europe, we 
have also allowed it to bring us to the same 
pass. 

In the great and wonderful epic of 
America, how we used to be thrilled, as 
children, with the story of the first coming 
of the pioneer. As he first came across the 
ocean in small ships such as we would not 
now think of going to sea in, we thought of 
him as a daring hero. Then as he took his 
way westward into the depths of the wilder- 
ness, how we journeyed with him, breathless, 
in the great adventure I Is there not then a 
profound significance — a deep reproach — 
in the fact that where we once tingled with 
joy over the picture of the cabin in the forest, 
of the rude "home," the family ''fireside," 
the welcoming "hearth-fire," the sheltering 
"roof -tree," we are now content to dismiss 
the picture from our minds and talk heart- 
lessly about "housing." 

We even include the poor man's home in 
our philanthropies and thus are quite willing 
to pass over to the hands of charity the thing 
[ 30 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

which we once glorified as the very essence 
of our American spirit and courage — the 
quest of a home! Bearing these things in 
mind, let us look for a moment at the Thir- 
teenth Census (1910), and particularly at 
the chapter entitled ''Ownership of Homes," 
for here we shall find some plain facts which 
show very clearly that we have fallen far 
away from the principles of home-making 
and home-owning that once helped to make 
up our national ideal. For a whole century 
at least the United States was the goal of the 
landless and the houseless of all nations. 
Men came here to found the home which 
they could not found in their own coun- 
try, because the land was there all held 
by a minority class of rich owners who 
would not sell it, and who thus forced 
the majority of the people to remain 
forever landless and a tenant class practi- 
cally at the mercy of a few landlords. Some 
months before his death, Mr. Roosevelt ut- 
tered a warning about the change that had 
crept over us, and he pointed out the fact 
that there was a steady decline in the number 
of owned farms and a consequent steady in- 
crease in tenant farmers. No one who has 
studied this question in the last decade has 
ignored its deep significance, but the same 

[ 31 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 





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[82 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

fact is equally patent when we study the 
house. Here, ownership by the occupant 
has declined in a far greater proportion 
than has farm ownership. The Census of 
1910 tells the story in the accompanying 
table. 

The figures for Alaska and Hawaii are of 
the greatest interest, because they show how 
swiftly the same process of changing land 
ownership to land tenantship takes place 
even in newly opened lands. The difference 
in the ten-year periods is marked by great 
descents. As to the causes which have 
brought about this result, which is so op- 
posed to our ideals of freedom and liberty, 
there can be but one general answer. Under 
our economic system of permitting unre- 
stricted speculation in land, we have denied 
the political and social ideal upon which the 
nation was founded. We have turned our 
backs on democracy by beguiling ourselves 
with crude attempts to solve it in political 
terms, the while we gave ourselves unbridled 
license to exploit our land and all that it con- 
tained with no thought of what might be 
the ultimate effect upon ourselves as a na- 
tion and upon the democracy we professed 
to seek. The result we shall have to reckon 
with. Landlordism has steadily increased 
[ 33 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

until we are in a fair way to actually repeat 
the very cycle from which men of other na- 
tions wished to escape by coming hither. It 
was an inevitable outcome of the individu- 
alism which has passed current for freedom, 
and constitutes a national acceptance of the 
doctrine that the whole welfare of the nation 
must give way to the right of the individual 
to pursue his path as he pleases. We have 
struggled to curb this individualistic willful- 
ness by many forms of legislation such as, 
for example, the Sherman Law forbidding 
trusts, but it all appears to have but little or 
no effect. 

If we ask whether it is best, in any coun- 
try, that the land and the buildings should 
be owned by a minority which inevitably 
grows smaller and smaller and thus richer 
and richer, we may safely answer that such 
a condition has never yet built up a healthy 
nation. Wherever it has been tried, there 
have been revolutions. If, however, we as- 
sume, as so many do, that the increasing 
wealth of the few is a result that cannot be 
prevented in the competitive struggle be- 
tween men whose abilities are so unequal in 
carrying on business, industry and com- 
merce, then we must admit that life consists 
merely of an endless and hopeless repetition 

[ 34 ] 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME 

of cycles, each with its debacle and rebirth. 
But does the faith that these cannot and 
ought not to be prevented still claim so large 
a body of adherents, now that we have 
passed through the throes of the most violent 
convulsion the world has known — when we 
can see more clearly than ever before 
through eyes to which science has lent a new 
visionary power, when the problems of 
Peace are seen to be grave and serious in- 
deed? 

It is upon our answer to this question that 
the problem of building houses for those who 
work depends for the right solution, and it 
is this which also gives such emphasis to the 
importance of dealing rightly with the pres- 
ent dire emergency of shortage in houses, 
high rents, and the consequent congestion 
to which so many thousands of our workers, 
with their wives and families, are con- 
demned. War made this so vital a question 
that we had to face it whether we would or 
no, but Peace also demands that we face it, 
and quickly too. And yet we cannot in any 
way find the right solution without asking 
ourselves the following questions; they 
weave themselves into the figures in the 
Census with an insistence which not only im- 
plores but commands us to find the answer. 
[ 35 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

Can it be true that the great body of our 
citizens no longer care about possessing a 
house? Has Hving in rented substitutes, in 
a steadily increasing degree over a long 
period of years, made them willing to give 
up the idea of owning a home? Do we ad- 
mit that the "efficiency" of our life is so im- 
portant that the great majority must consent 
to a landlordism which cannot be escaped? 
Must we as other nations have done, pursue 
to the bitter and disastrous end a system 
which says that the workman must give up 
his wish to own a home in order that he may 
save for himself the largest possible measure 
of economic freedom, by always being free 
to move without danger of losing his sav- 
ings? The facts offer sad evidence of the 
condition to which we have arrived, and the 
right solution of what we have pathetically 
termed the ''industrial housing" problem 
depends utterly upon our resolve to study 
the problem with open minds and with all 
the facts squarely before us. 



[ 86 ] 



Ill 

HOUSES AND WAGES 

ONE element of the house question 
which so far has received too Httle at- 
tention is wages. We believe it will 
not be disputed that as wages rise, rents rise 
also. Why should this be so ? First, because 
of the natural cupidity of landlords, who 
find it possible to demand more rent as soon 
as they know that there has been a raise in 
wages. Second, because of the inevitable 
pyramiding process forced by our economic 
system. Under this process, and by a slow 
but inflexible progress, the cost of living 
eventually overtakes each wage advance won 
by the worker. Sometimes it happens 
quickly, sometimes slowly. Then there 
comes, and of very necessity, a fresh demand 
for higher wages. The process has gone on, 
almost without recognition, until it has 
reached a point, under the imusual impact of 
war, where the problem of making both ends 
meet is almost beyond solution for a great 
number of our population. 
[ 37 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

In between the organized skilled workers, 
who may secure temporary wage advances, 
and the employers, who may add the cost of 
the wage advances to the cost of their 
products, rests a great body of unorganized 
workers, both manual and clerical, and even 
professional. Their problem under present- 
day conditions has become grave indeed. 
They are caught, as it were, between the 
upper and nether millstones, and are without 
means of bettering their condition through 
any organized action. 

In this connection it must be recognized 
that no industry can save itself by itself. 
Hitherto we have had a certain percentage 
of workmen organized to a point where they 
could succeed in bettering their condition to 
a degree. But the cost of this betterment 
has been charged back on the cost of pro- 
duction and thus has had to be borne by the 
general consuming public. Under the stress 
of war, and the consequent increased cost of 
living, wages generally have risen until they 
have brought us to a condition where we 
have begun to see the impossibility of mak- 
ing wages overtake the increased cost of the 
necessities of life. This has created a fur- 
ther perception on the part of unorganized 
workers, of the necessity of more unions. 
[ 38 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

The brain-workers see that they must pur- 
sue the trade-union method as a means of 
protecting themselves. New organizations 
are springing to life with astonishing rapid- 
ity. But under this concentrated impact the 
whole industrial fabric begins to creak and 
groan in an ominous manner. We find our- 
selves caught in a vortex of economic pres- 
sure which our industrial system cannot bear, 
and yet the foolish resort to pyramiding is 
the only answer that we seem able to make. 
This process of pyramiding, so long as it 
was based on a comparatively equal distri- 
bution of rising wages and rising costs, 
might go on endlessly, perhaps, within the 
confines of one nation. That is to say, as 
long as the same ratio of wage to cost of 
living was maintained, it might be said that 
it made no difference as to what the money 
payment happened to be. As long as wages 
would buy the same amount of living neces- 
sities, comforts, conveniences and pleasures, 
it would make no difference to anybody what 
actual amount of money was received in 
wages. (Of course, the process possesses a 
great inherent danger, in that it provides no 
basis for paying workers a higher real wage, 
it permits the more rapid accumulation of 
large sums of money by an individual or by 
[ 39 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

a group of individuals, as is already the case 
in the United States, and it ought not, under 
any circumstances, to be accepted as a de- 
sirable basis for building an economic sys- 
tem. ) But when one nation comes into com- 
petition with another, the wage cost of pro- 
duction is a vital factor as affecting the com- 
petitive prices of commodities which one na- 
tion desires to sell in world markets as 
against another nation. 

One way of attempting to preserve the 
high wage basis in a given country, has been 
to lay a protective tariff against imports 
coming from countries having a lower wage 
basis. One of the prime claims made by the 
advocates of this form of tax has been that 
its adoption by a country would maintain 
the high wages of the workmen in that 
country. But as it is notorious that manu- 
facturers under a protective tariff in the 
United States have been able to sell their 
wares in other countries at a less price than 
in their own, and at a profit as well, it would 
seem to be clear that the prices charged for 
goods sold in the home market must have 
been unduly high and profits exorbitant. If 
goods can be shipped to Europe and sold at 
a profit at a lower price than in the United 
States, why can they not be sold for the 
[ 40 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

lower price at home? But even putting that 
question aside, it is perfectly clear that the 
protective tariff does not solve the problem 
of pyramiding. Under a protective tariff 
wages do not remain stationary, nor do they 
rise as fast as the cost of living.* While the 
compilations of our Governmental agencies 
show this very clearly, the fact has been 
driven home as never before, since the con- 
clusion of the war. The menace of land- 
lordism has now reached such an acute stage 
as to attract universal attention, and as it is 
no longer possible to invest money in decent 
homes at a low rental, because wage earners 
cannot afford to pay the rent required to 
make a profit to the investor, all kinds of 
plans are being proposed in order to attract 
capital to house building. England, recog- 
nizing a condition which we are slow to see, 
has granted a subsidy out of the national 
treasury for the building of such homes. 
But let us not forget that this is no cure for 
the housing problem — it is merely the de- 
spairing act of paternalism forced by an un- 
willingness to grapple with the disease itself. 
Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, one of the re- 
puted financial authorities of the United 
States, after three months' study of the 

* See Appendix A. 

[ 41 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

after-war problems of Europe, said, in a 
speech delivered in New York City on May 
26, 1919, a few days after his return from 
England: * ''England has held the premier 
position in the international industrial mar- 
kets. America grew, but England grew too. 
America grew faster. So did Germany grow 
faster. But England had, up to the out- 
break of the war, held the premier position. 
Now how did she hold it? She had little raw 
material, some iron and some coal. That 
was all. I will tell you how she held it. She 
held it by underpaying labor. That was her 
differential. She underpaid labor until to- 
day labor has not a house over its head in 
England, and that Government is undertak- 
ing to build one million houses for working 
men.'' 

Unfortunately, Mr. Vanderlip's state- 
ment as to the housing conditions in Eng- 
land cannot be dismissed with any such 
simple analysis as that, and as an economic 
illustration it needs further examination. 
England's workers have been underpaid. So 
have all workers. No country has paid labor 
fairly, and no country can pay labor fairly. 
It is not possible, under our economic sys- 
tem. The workers of England are today 

* From a press report. 
[ 42 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

preparing to obtain a different result, and 
the Government of that country is wise 
enough to recognize the fact that if it does 
not subsidize the building of houses for 
workers, either they will not be built, in 
which case the result would be a revolution, 
or else the housing demand will be met by 
the erection of the cheapest kind of build- 
ings, no better than slums when new, and 
England now knows that not only must the 
old slums go, but that she must prevent any 
more from coming into existence. Her 
national safety demands it, and the life of 
her industry is dependent upon the aboli- 
tion of the slums and the provision of 
healthy homes and a satisfying community 
existence as a definite and permanent trans- 
lation of that "better world to live in" for 
which her workers were asked to make their 
heroic sacrifice. 

Lord D'Abernon, upon his investigation 
of the drink problem in England, reached the 
conclusion that men and women get drunk 
in England for the most part in order to 
escape the horrors and the misery of their 
environment ; this conclusion will not be lost 
to sight, even though the land-owning class 
in England will struggle bitterly in oppos- 
ing the true remedy, by which alone 
[ 43 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

England can change her environmental con- 
ditions. 

But the environmental horror and its en- 
suing depression upon the individual, 
against which the struggle is increasing until 
a large part of the world is inquiring as to 
what is to be done, are the result of our 
pyramiding process as applied to wages and 
the cost of living. They indicate beyond dis- 
pute that the process has slowly spun itself 
out, until, under the added burdens of the 
cost of the war, the pyramid is beginning to 
show signs of weakness at the base. These 
weaknesses will increase as there comes the 
inevitable necessity for nations to make 
profits out of international trade. Their 
debts owed to their own peoples may (to a 
greater or lesser degree) be extinguished by 
internal taxation but their external obliga- 
tions must be paid out of the profits of inter- 
national trade. There must be an exchange 
of products between nations. There will be 
a pronounced competition in the markets of 
the world, keener than ever before. The 
pyramid raised out of successive wage in- 
creases and successive higher living costs 
will operate as a great handicap to those 
nations which are on a higher wage basis 
than others. A greater per capita produc- 
[ 44 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

tion might tend in some degrees to offset 
this handicap providing that greater pro- 
duction can be obtained, and the profits 
therefrom turned over to the producers in- 
stead of to the non-producers as under our 
present system. But the whole process 
ought to be examined impartially as a basic 
principle of our whole economic system, and 
above all things, let us remember that our 
pyramid stands not on its base, but upon 
its apex. The larger it grows, the more 
props it needs to keep it from falling over 
and crushing us ; it is only a question of time 
when no props will be strong enough to pre- 
vent the fall, for we are only trying to defy 
a physical principle that cannot be defied. 

The truth is, also, that the pyramiding 
process simply does not work on anything 
like an equal basis, and the reason for that, 
at least in respect to housing, lies clearly in 
the fact that the increase in the costs of 
building sites outstrips the ability of the 
worker to secure a wage increase that will 
enable him to meet the higher rent demanded 
on account of the ever higher price of land. 
He simply cannot keep pace with the rising 
price. As a result, as we have said, it is a 
generally recognized fact that it is no longer 
possible in the United States to build decent 
[ 45 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

houses within the rent-paying ability of low- 
wage workers. The same condition exists 
in England, where the national treasury 
must now contribute a subsidy to the build- 
ing of small houses. There are those who 
contend that this is due to the war, but the 
facts will discover to whoever cares to in- 
vestigate, that the same condition actually 
existed for many years prior to the war, in 
Europe, and for some years prior to the war, 
in this country. 

As rentals are a very large item in the 
budget of the workman, whether he be a 
wage-earner or a clerk, so do they also con- 
stitute the largest single factor in the pyra- 
miding process involved in the effort to 
make the rise in wages gain over the rise in 
the cost of living. Thus they contribute more 
than any other single factor to the instability 
of labor, to discontent, and to the continual 
strife between organized labor and organized 
capital. If the housing question could be 
seen and recognized and understood as a 
question of wage-stabilization, both em- 
ployers and employees could then begin to 
grapple with it intelligently. But the fact 
is that housing reformers and philanthro- 
pists have persisted in keeping the housing 
question in an isolation hospital, where it 
[ 46 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

was considered as a peculiar problem to be 
solved by building cheaply, skillful planning 
and continually discovering how to put more 
people in the same space. Thus the disease 
was never diagnosed in relation to wages, 
rentals, taxations, cost of land, and cost of 
living, and the whole mechanism of industry. 
Seen in this true relationship as a sick 
member of our whole system, it will be at 
last understood. Looked at under a micro- 
scope as an interesting, diverting and some- 
times a troublesome social phenomenon, 
having nothing to do with anything except 
houses, it has no chance whatever of being 
understood, diagnosed, or cured. 

Architects have wrestled with the problem 
in vain, failing to realize that all of their 
skill in planning and designing was neu- 
trahzed by economic factors over which they 
had not the slightest control. Each time 
they seemed to have squeezed the last drop 
of room out of a given piece of land, it at 
once became necessary to squeeze out more. 
All of their effort in contriving economies 
and in the more efficient use of space, have, 
in the final analysis, contributed nothing to 
the problem of how to provide decent and 
comfortable homes for people of small wages 
or salaries. In the larger cities, the answer 
[ 47] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

has been the tenement; the agglomerate 
hives where human beings have succumbed 
to smaller and smaller rooms, less and less 
light and air, and a generally uninspiring 
and depressing environment. In the smaller 
towns and villages, the answer has been 
shacks and hovels. Why? Not because 
there is not enough room in the world for 
decent living conditions, but because sites 
for house building purposes increase in price 
faster than workers can increase their wages. 
This rising cost of sites brings a correspond- 
ing rise in the cost of the building. In order 
to insure a return upon the investment, more 
tenants must be crowded onto the same piece 
of land. The process continues unchecked, 
until the point is reached where the continu- 
ally rising land costs compel not only that 
the house shall be reduced to the lowest pos- 
sible minimum of rooms, but that each room 
shall also be reduced to its lowest possible 
minimum of space. Yet still there is no end 
to the rising rental. Such a process has been 
going on in New York City, for example, 
for many years. It has now reached its cul- 
minating point, for the cost of sites and the 
cost of building have made it impossible 
longer to build any kind of low-rental homes, 
no matter how skilfully they may be planned, 

[ 48 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

at a price that will return a profit to the in- 
vestor. 

New York City has thus been suddenly 
awakened to an appalling condition of 
housing. The shortage of houses, due to 
suspension of building during the war, has 
made possible a form of rent profiteering of 
which far too many landlords are willing to 
take advantage. Prices of housing property 
have soared as in a land boom on the open 
prairie, but they are based on the exorbitant 
rentals which the owners are able to extort. 
Speculation, everywhere the dominant mo- 
tive in house building, is suddenly provided 
with a new weapon of mighty and sinister 
power. London is struggling in the same 
predicament, and Parliament is being im- 
plored to grant relief. Paris is in the midst 
of a housing disaster. Almost all large 
centers in the United States are aflFected to a 
greater or less degree. 

A study of the conditions surrounding 
home ownership, this now almost extinct in- 
stitution in New York City, should be of 
more than local interest.* 

"The proportion of rent-payers is increas- 

* "Home Ownership in New York City," by Herbert S. 
Swan. The Journal of the American Institute of Archi- 
tects, January, 1918. 

[ 49 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

ing; the proportion of home-owners decreas- 
ing. Tenantcy is becoming the universal 
rule and home-ownership the rare exception. 
The ownership of a free home is a tradition 
of the past. If the present tendency con- 
tinues, it will only be a question of time when 
the ownership and use of land in New York 
City will be completely divorced, and the 
whole city will, in effect, stand in the rela- 
tion of a tenant to an absentee landlord. 

"The percentage of owned homes in the 
city is declining; that of rented homes in- 
creasing. In 1900, one family in every eight 
owned its home; in 1910, only one family in 
every nine owned its home. In 1900, one 
family in every twenty owned a free home; 
in 1910, only one family in twenty-eight 
owned a free home. In 1900, 42.2 per cent 
of the owned homes were free homes; in 
1910, 30.2 per cent of the owned homes were 
free homes. During this ten-year period the 
total number of homes in the city increased 
41.2 per cent; the number of free homes de- 
clined .8 of 1 per cent. The number of free 
homes in the city, instead of being increased 
by the erection of new homes, lost one of the 
homes owned free in 1900 for every thous- 
and new homes constructed during the 
decade. 

[ 50 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

"Out of every thousand new homes con- 
structed in the decade, 110 were owned 
homes. In Chicago 290 were owned homes; 
in Cleveland, 312; in St. Louis, 327; in Phil- 
adelphia, 451. In only one of the next five 
largest cities was the number of new owned 
homes per thousand less than in New York. 
In Boston it was 88. Of the fifty-one cities 
in the United States with a population ex- 
ceeding 100,000 the number of owned homes 
per thousand new homes was probably 
greater in Spokane than in any other city. 
There is was 584. 

''The number of free homes per thousand 
new homes was a minus quantity in New 
York City, but in Philadelphia 95 out of 
every 1,000 new homes built were free 
homes; in Cleveland, 112; in Chicago, 126; 
and in St. Louis, 173. Even in Boston it 
was 8. 

"In Spokane it was 283. 

"Chicago, with less than half as many 
homes, has more owned homes than New 
York City, which has only two-thirds as 
many free homes as Chicago. Philadelphia, 
with less than one-third the number of 
homes, has more free homes than New York 
City. 

"The situation affecting home-ownership 
[ 51 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

in the city (New York) may be epitomized 
mider four points : 

''1. The number of rented homes is in- 
creasing faster than the number of owned 
homes. 

"2. While there is an increase in the num- 
ber of owned homes, this increase occurs 
not among the free homes, but exclusively 
among the encumbered homes. In fact, 
there are more homes mortgaged in a given 
period than there are homes purchased. In 
other words, the encumbered homes are in- 
creasing at the expense of the free homes 
whose owners are gradually either mort- 
gaging them or disposing of them to join the 
tenant class. 

"3. The owners of encimibered homes are 
not paying off and cancelling their mort- 
gages in order that they might become the 
owners of free homes. A new lien is con- 
tracted for every mortgage liquidated on an 
owned home. 

"4. Only a moiety of the equity is ac- 
quired in any new home purchased. For 
every home in which a full equity is acquired, 
another home is mortgaged." 

But New York cannot now alone extri- 
cate itself from the pit into which it has al- 
lowed itself to fall. Government of some 
[ 52 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

kind must come to its aid. And with an 
ignorance that is as subhme as it is pathetic, 
it is suggested by many that funds at a low 
rate of interest should be provided by the 
State, in order that house building may be 
financed. Some set the figure as high as 
$20,000,000, but that it should be supposed 
that such a method will effect a permanent 
cure, is incredible. 

Government must aid, no doubt, but it 
must first formulate a complete program 
based upon curing a disease and not upon 
alleviating a symptom. The State, or the 
City must surround whatever credit system 
may be adopted with legislation that will 
defeat the effect of land increments; other- 
wise nothing but a momentary improvement 
can be gained. Without such safeguards, 
another speculative cycle will be launched on 
a large scale, out of which land owners will 
reap enormous profits, and by which the 
housing question will again be brought to a 
worse condition than now confronts it. As 
site costs rise wherever houses are built, 
house costs must increase. This is known 
to every one who knows anything about the 
use of land and the building of houses. Yet 
the answer has always been sought in two 
ways: First, in a tenement house code, 

[ 53 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

which, after landlords have taken such an 
advantage of tenants that the slums become 
a public nuisance and a public menace, is 
enacted as a law which fixes the minimum 
conditions of safety, sanitation and space in 
a tenement house (which minimum condi- 
tions at once become the maximum!). 
Second, in skillful architectural planning 
whereunder the family might be compressed 
into the smallest possible area. It has all 
been not only wrong, but wholly ineffective, 
— and yet it now is proposed, in several 
states and cities to continue the same scheme 
with government funds.* 

In this connection it is worthy of noting 
that Dr. Addison, then President of the Lo- 
cal Government Board of England, the body 
first charged with the administration of 
the new housing Act in that country, said 
the following things at the second reading 
of the Housing Bill in Parliament: "The 
war has caused arrears in the building of 
houses to the extent of 350,000. Then there 
were a very large number of houses unfit for 
human habitation. An incomplete return of 
1914 showed that there were 70,000 houses 
quite unfit for habitation, and a further 

* For suggested tjrpes of wise legislation looking to 
permanent improvement in housing see pages 96 and 156. 

[ 54 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

300,000 that were seriously defective. There 
were about 3,000,000 people living in over- 
crowded conditions — more than two in a 
room — and in the area covered by the 
London County Council their return showed 
758,000 living under these dreadful condi- 
tions. The cost to the nation in caring for 
the tuberculosis generated in these slums 
must be many millions a year. Therefore 
the question of the slum areas must be dealt 
with as part of their housing scheme. No 
scheme which centered solely on building 
houses on open land would suffice to deal 
with existing evils. There were 1,800 Local 
Authorities entitled to deal with housing; 
but their powers were inadequate to remedy 
the evils. The cost of acquisition of sites 
was almost prohibitive in every case, and no 
solution of the problem could be complete 
until they could make the cost of acquisition 
of land in some way commensurate with its 
value." * 

Let no one think that the condition is any 
better or any different in the United States ! 
Our problem is not alone one of building 
new houses or of scrapping several hundred 
thousand old ones as well, which cannot with 
safety remain as a menace to both industry 

* From a press report in the London Daily News. 
[ 55 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

and our form of government, — it is frankly 
a problem of land control. 

The Land Acquisition Act was discussed 
in Parliament on Thursday, April 11, 1919. 
It provided for the acquisition of land at its 
post-war inflated value, and it is very curious 
to discover that while Sir Gordon Hewart, 
the Attorney General, stated that the Bill 
was based upon the recommendations of the 
Committee on Land Acquisition, of which 
Mr. Leslie Scott was Chairman and which 
had been conducting a long study of the land 
problem in England, Mr. Scott himself rose 
in Parliament and moved the rejection of 
the Bill on the ground that the Government 
"had failed to provide a cheap, simple and 
expeditious procedure, and had made no at- 
tempt to deal with the subject of compen- 
sation as a whole, and particularly with 
'betterment and injurious affection.' " When 
it is remembered that during the war, Eng- 
land, under the Defense of the Realm Act 
took land for housing at its pre-war value, 
one is not astonished at the indignant protest 
of Liberals, such as Sir Donald Maclean, 
for example, who derided the Bill in unmeas- 
ured terms and characterized it as ren- 
dering worthless the whole social program 
proposed. 

[ 56 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

It is plain that the vast housing schemes 
of England, upon which her whole industrial 
fabric may now be said in large measure to 
depend — since the housing shortage in 
that country is a real menace — have been 
seriously affected by the passage of the Land 
Acquisition Act. The Government, under 
the Act, is obliged to take land at its market 
value and not at its actual value. It 
seemed impossible that England, in the pres- 
ent crisis, would fail to adopt a new national 
attitude on the land question. But there, as 
here, the old theories of land ownership and 
the right to appropriate site increments, still 
permeates the national consciousness. Less 
so there, than here, perhaps, since land has 
been so little available for ownership in Eng- 
land that most people are resigned to a land- 
less condition; this ought to make the 
problem of land control easier, instead of 
harder, for land control means that a people 
must surrender its right to use land as it 
pleases, without any consideration of the 
public welfare, and also discontinue the 
present system whereunder land owners are 
free to tax humanity to the uttermost point 
the traffic will bear. There is no solution of 
the housing problem — and thus no solu- 
tion of the other problems that are every- 
[ 57 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

where presenting themselves in increased 
costs, higher wages, and the endless cycle of 
pyramiding — until the fundamental ques- 
tion of land use is solved. The very fact 
that England's industrial life is now in 
danger, and that she needs to build a million 
new houses to save it, does not deter land 
owners from demanding a Bill that will 
enable them to put the highest possible price 
on their land. The very presence of the na- 
tion's dire need for land, sends prices soaring 
as though gold had been discovered in a 
suburban lot. 

Think for a moment of what this means. 
It means that the state must pay more for 
the land than it was worth until the need of 
the state became apparent. This extra cost 
can be met in only two ways : first, by build- 
ing more houses to the acre and thus de- 
feating the very object of the whole housing 
scheme, or, second, by charging a higher 
rent for the houses, when built. But, 
as in no case can the workmen afford 
to pay a fair rental for these houses, 
the new law compels the community in 
which the houses are built to grant a 
subsidy, the money for which is obtained 
by the compulsory levy of a special tax of 
one penny in the pound. As even this tax, 
[ 58 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

added to the rental paid by the tenants, will 
not suffice to pay the interest charges on the 
loan, the cost of upkeep, and provide amor- 
tization, the State here steps in and agrees to 
make up the difference. As an idea of what 
this difference means, it may be stated that 
the rehousing schemes for London will cost 
the State about $5,000,000 a year, until they 
have been amortized. At this rate the an- 
nual cost of new housing to the commimities 
of England and to the nation will run into 
a colossal sum. Every dollar paid for land, 
above its fair value, increases this sum. More 
than that, the value added to the unbuilt land 
by the vast operations of the Government, 
will also be presented to the owner. 

Thus, when the workers of England are 
asked to produce more, as a means of res- 
cuing their country from her present in- 
dustrial and financial difficulties, they may 
well look at the land-owners with a wonder- 
ing eye. The tax which they levy is only an 
act of piracy. 

( Since the writing of the foregoing para- 
graph, the official statement of the Ministry 
of Health, up to October 31, 1919, shows 
that under the terms of the new Housing Act 
there have been submitted to the Ministry 
5460 schemes for new housing develop- 
[ 59 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

ments. These involved a land area of 47,250 
acres and houses to the number of 41,023. 
Of these schemes, 1950 involving 21,850 
acres of land and 27,486 houses have been 
approved. When it is considered that the 
lowest estimate, on a most conservative 
basis, called for not less than 500,000 houses 
in order to meet the crisis in England, it 
may easily be understood how far behind 
lags the effort to meet it. 

Commenting on the situation, coincidently 
with the publication of the figures above 
cited, the Westminster Gazette remarks: 
"Dr. Addison and Sir Kingsley Wood ex- 
plained to the Parliamentary Housing 
Group on Tuesday the progress of the Gov- 
ernment housing scheme. We had statistics 
which are already too familiar about sites 
acquired, loans authorized, and schemes sub- 
mitted. And we would willingly give all the 
statistics for a sight of a few completed 
houses built under Government plans. 
How long is the present deadlock to last? 
Nearly a year has passed since the armistice, 
and for months before the armistice plans 
were said to be in preparation. It need not 
take a year to build a house, yet no houses 
have been built. Respectable people walk 
the streets with sandwich-boards proclaim- 
[ 60 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

ing that they cannot get a home, and the 
Minister responsible retorts that he has 
passed plans for 27,000 houses to meet a 
shortage of half a million. Yet even the 
27,000 only exist on paper. Unless Dr. 
Addison can get it into his head that houses 
are substantial things of brick and mortar, 
in which people can live, and not something 
drawn on a sheet of paper, he should make 
room for somebody who has more practical 
notions on the matter. . . . Let us realize 
that with every month housing conditions in 
the villages and in the industrial quarters of 
the towns are becoming worse. . . . " 

One is sorry for Dr. Addison. Parlia- 
ment handed him an impossible task, for it 
obliges land to be taken for housing schemes 
at its market and not its real value. Up to 
the present he has had the assistance of the 
Government's Valuation Department, which 
has been able to effect some savings in land 
costs. These have averaged from £119 in 
country areas to <£212 in urban sections. 
But only a fraction of the necessary land 
has been acquired and the prices will 
continually go higher and higher. How 
strange that in war the Government could 
take land for housing at its pre-war ac- 
tual value, and now is obliged to take it 
[ 61 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

at its post-war market value! A thousand 
Dr. Addisons could not overcome such a 
condition, for the mounting price of land is 
assuredly reflected in the cost of materials 
and the wages of workmen. 

It is apparent, therefore, that the whole 
English re-housing scheme is in grave dan- 
ger of becoming a fiasco. In addition to 
the difficulties mentioned, there are others. 
Loans are hard to obtain, even under the se- 
curity offered by the Housing Act, for the 
mounting cost of good houses frightens the 
tax-payers, on whom a considerable part of 
the burden will fall. Thus it is not surpris- 
ing to read in the English press, wherever 
one turns, a persistent clamor for any 
kind of housing such as will afford at least 
temporary shelter. The ready-cut wooden 
houses used in Canada and the United States 
are being discussed, and their importation in 
vast quantities is being considered. Violent 
opposition manifests itself, first from those 
who cannot bear the thought of an English 
countryside littered with the barbarities of 
America, and second from the workers them- 
selves, who have already raised the cry, 
"Wood for the workers, bricks for their 
betters." 

Apparently the Government is feeling out 
[ 62 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

the opposition, pleading the urgent need of 
houses and the financial situation of the 
Treasury as factors which may compel a con- 
siderable reduction in the quality of the 
houses to be built under its program. 

The present serves to illumine the spec- 
tacle more vividly than ever before, and one 
seems to see the human race shackled and 
manacled to an idea, yet blind to the fact 
that the idea spells disaster, perhaps death, 
to civilization; blind to the burden under 
which it staggers along; and blinder still to 
the reason why that burden continues to in- 
crease, now in the shape of rent, now in food, 
now in clothing, now in this necessity, now 
in that. Land is our national Monte Carlo. 
It is the green table on which we gamble 
away the wealth of the nation, and its pros- 
perity and well-being and social stability as 
well. It is idle to condemn present land- 
owners. If the landed of today were to be 
usurped by the landless, there would come 
no change. It is not a class problem, but a 
system that is the fault. Out of that system 
spring huge profits in land, but always with 
the same direful result to the community 
that gives them away. We see district after 
district become congested, reduced to slums, 
given over to the dregs of the cup that a few 
[ 63 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

have drained. The evidence is piled moun- 
tain high, but the will to find the solution has 
not yet germinated in the national conscious- 
ness. Sometime it will come, because it will 
be forced by conditions beside which those at 
present annoying New York City will seem 
trifling. Yet, there is still time to ward 
them off. And who should do it? 

Why not the business men of the United 
States, the employers of labor, the masters 
of finance, the monopolists of credit? What 
would contribute more to social and labor 
stability than a stabilized rent? That is the 
phase of the problem which ought to present 
itself to intelligent men, yet we waste so 
much of our time in the United States over 
a discussion of class issues rather than over 
systems, that it seems almost idle to hope 
that any perception of the real nature of the 
housing problem will dawn on our captains 
of industry, until it is too late. But the warn- 
ing is writ so large, just now, that perhaps 
some of them will see it. If so, we shall get 
requests for State action such as will make 
possible the control of large areas of unused 
land, whereon communities may be estab- 
lished under non-speculative conditions. 
Also, we shall get a perception of the neces- 
sity for demolishing slum areas, as national 
[ 64 ] 



HOUSES AND WAGES 

menaces to our physical and moral well- 
being, and their replacement with decent 
dwellings. It is a large view that is now 
needed; woe be unto us if we take the little 
view of the palliative housing reformer. 

The housing question will not down until 
it is settled right, and all efforts to com- 
promise in the solution will only make the 
final cost more staggering. 



[ 65 ] 



IV 

THE EMPLOYER AND THE 
HOUSING QUESTION 

WHAT is the interest of the employer 
in the housing question? Looking 
backward to the early beginnings of 
centralized industry in the United States, 
we find that good houses were once esteemed 
as an indispensable part of the plant. 
Among the earlier established cotton manu- 
facturing industries in New England, for 
example, there may be found traces of ex- 
cellent corporation houses ; some of them are 
of great architectural interest, and indicate 
that our real American traditions of the 
house and the home had not then been tram- 
pled under foot by competitive industry. 
But visiting these little towns of today, one 
is depressed at the sight of such slums and 
congested areas as now exist. Little by 
little they have crept in, ever growing 
meaner and more squalid, until they now 
beggar description. 

[ 66 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

Manufacturers have entirely failed to note 
the presence in their midst of a microbe bent 
upon their destruction. They may, them- 
selves, in many cases, have participated in 
the havoc caused by this tiny organism. 
They may themselves have reaped large 
profits from having bought land cheap and 
sold it dear. Someone has been doing that 
in every community. But the total effect 
has been to lower the living conditions of a 
large body of workers. It would be inter- 
esting to compare the percentage of wages 
spent for rent out of the wages received by 
a millworker in Rhode Island, in 1840, and 
the percentage spent in rent by the worker 
of today. But the living conditions repre- 
sent a comparison that can be made by any- 
one who cares to make a little pilgrimage 
through the cotton manufacturing districts. 
It is true that the corporation has sup- 
planted, almost entirely, the individual 
owner. The point of contact between actual 
owner and worker has been lost, and with it 
that degree of human interest and brotherli- 
ness that existed in the early days of manu- 
facturing in New England, when the master 
was one of the workers and when all were 
largely of what is now known as American 
stock and parentage. The stockholders are 
[ 67 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

now the owners and they are represented by 
a hired agent whose business it is to produce 
dividends. Human interest no longer ex- 
ists. Competition has reached a point where 
an agent cannot alone change the housing 
conditions surrounding his particular fac- 
tory. If his competitors will not act, then 
he cannot act, except under the fortunate 
circumstances of a very prosperous business 
and the willingness of the stockholders to 
permit an expenditure of their dividends. In 
the larger manufacturing districts, where 
many industries cluster, no one is respon- 
sible for the housing conditions, and hitherto, 
it has been generally accepted that the manu- 
facturer had no interest in his workers be- 
yond the wage paid and the work done. 

But what is this microbe that continually 
ravages industry of every kind? It is the 
microbe of unearned increment, — of the 
value added to land by community growth, 
and appropriated by individuals. The ad- 
dition of value is a natural thing. The use 
value of land must increase as its productiv- 
ity or desirability increases. But that use 
value, as has so often been pointed out, be- 
longs to those who create it. Even if there 
are still those who do not and will not agree 
to that theory, which seems to be the most 
[ 68 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

simple form of economic justice, it remains 
to be pointed out that the appropriation of 
that unearned increment by the individual 
land owner constitutes a disease that is con- 
tinuously attacking all forms of organized 
industry. It is an enemy which is fatal to 
any wage or labor stability. It is wholly op- 
posed to the point of view of the intelligent 
manufacturer, who seeks to make goods by 
employing workers and paying them a fair 
wage. Why? Because the individuals who 
capture the unearned increment on land are, 
in reality, adding a capital charge to all in- 
dustry. It is a capital which does not ap- 
pear in any shares of stock. It is a capital 
charge over which the manufacturer has no 
control. But it is a capital upon which the 
holders demand the payment of a dividend 
by the manufacturer, and the collection of 
which they are in a position to enforce 
whether the manufacturer wills or no. They 
may, and often do, ruin him, in securing their 
payment. Thus the manufacturer who is 
located in a community where site values 
are still rising (and where, as a consequence, 
the citizens point with pride to the growing 
wealth of their community) is continually 
having his cost of doing business increased. 
His own taxes are likely to rise, in the first 
[ 69 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

place. They generally do. But this added 
burden is but a drop in the bucket compared 
to the general rise which takes place and 
which must be met by the manufacturer. 
His workmen find the cost of living to be on 
the increase. Their house rent is raised. 
Other things rise in proportion, but house 
rent is a large factor and one that always 
meets with a grudging and surly reception. 
Little extra added costs in other things may 
pass without too much complaining, but the 
landlord is always regarded as an exploiter, 
and even though he only raises the rent to 
meet his own added cost of living and doing 
business, the tenant always looks upon him 
with suspicion as a kind of bandit. The very 
name of landlord stinks in the nostrils of 
most tenants, and by the same token, the 
tenant is often looked upon by the landlord 
as a sort of necessary evil who pays a divi- 
dend in the shape of rent. That is the psy- 
chology of the relationship as a usual thing, 
and will explain one of the reasons why a 
rising rent is more menacing to the manu- 
facturer or employer than any other single 
factor in the pyramiding process. 

These happenings repeat themselves al- 
most daily, sometimes on a small and almost 
imperceptible scale; sometimes on a scale 
[ 70 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

that leaves nothing whatever to the imagina- 
tion, 

* "When the Lackawanna Steel Co. put 
its big plant on a stretch of vacant land near 
Buffalo and offered work there for several 
thousand men, the town land was worth 
$1,279,000. The city of Lackawanna, 14,000 
population, grew up there, and the land 
values skyrocketed from $91 per person to 
$644, the plant land being eliminated in each 
case. That inflated value for standing-room 
was, in fact, enough to keep about half the 
Lackawanna Steel Company employees 
from making their homes there at all, while 
many of those who do live there, huddle in 
dingy saloon lodgings and leave large areas 
idle in the hands of the land speculators. 
The annual value of a man's full share of 
Lackawanna land for himself and family of 
five at 6 per cent is, at the original value, 
5 X $91 X .06, or $27.30; at the enhanced 
value, $193. Money spent on land rent can- 
not be spent on house rent. The annual cost 
of a wholesome house is, let us say, $125 a 
year. If his modest lot cost only an addi- 
tional $10 or $20 annually, the worker could 

* "The Housing Problem in War and Peace," Chapter by 
Richard S. Childs. The Journal of the American Insti- 
tute of Architects, 1917. 

[ 71 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

more nearly afford those superior accommo- 
dations which the housing and city-planning 
experts yearn to give him. 

"The net unearned increment which 
Lackawanna has given as a princely gift to 
miscellaneous lucky private land-owners and 
speculators is $6,788,000, a figure large 
enough in itself to explain why Lackawanna 
is mostly ragged and squalid instead of 
dainty and wholesome.* 

''The Lackawanna Steel Co., after cre- 
ating the increment, finally bought addi- 
tional land at the enhanced values and 
erected a group of good houses for some of 
its employees, but was unable to charge to 
its low-paid workers rents high enough to 
make the operation anything but a philan- 
thropic proposition. 

"The U. S. Steel Corporation has taken 
the logical next step by purchasing town 
land in various places at the same time as the 
land for the new plants, thus in some degree 
anticipating and capturing the increment for 
the benefit of its workers. In some degree, 
I say, for the coming of a mysterious pur- 
chaser who buys land by the square mile 

* These figures are taken from an elaborate unpub- 
lished report by H. S. Swan, of New York, prepared for 
the Committee on New Industrial Towns. 

[ 72 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

cannot be altogether concealed, and the Cor- 
poration which, of course, has no power of 
condemnation, gets mercilessly mulcted by 
the land-owners who get wind of the opera- 
tion in time to raise their prices. 

''Having thus acquired the town-site, the 
Steel Corporation plans the streets and sells 
off the lots without attempting to reap a 
profit. But as population arrives, the un- 
earned increment arrives too and confers 
profits promiscuously upon the successive 
land-owners. In Gary, Indiana, which this 
Corporation created, in 1906, on vacant 
sand-dunes, this generous policy resulted in 
distributing $22,358,900 net to various 
private owners and speculators during the 
next ten years, a heavy burden upon the steel 
workers in their efforts to buy housing ac- 
commodations or anything else." * 

This is precisely what is meant in saying 
that the value added to land by industry con- 
stituted a capital charge on that industry 
itself. Those who own the land so raised in 
value demand, and are able to get, a higher 
return from it. The moment it is sold to 
build upon, that higher return makes its 

* From a report to the Committee on New Industrial 
Towns, by Dr. R. M. Haig, of Columbia University, re- 
published in part in the Political Science Quarterly, 
March, 1917. 

[ 73 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

presence felt by a necessarily higher rental 
for the house — or else in forcing a conges- 
tion on that land such as will produce the 
higher return at a lower rental, — which is 
the beginning of slums. 

But skilled workers will no longer tolerate 
slums, and to pay the higher rent resulting 
from this system, the wage-earner soon has 
to have a higher wage. How many times 
the average wage-earner of fifty has gone 
through that process in this country, who 
knows? And yet he and his children and 
his children's children must continue in the 
same manner, unless the pyramid falls to the 
ground before many years. Each time it is 
the manufacturer who pays first, and even 
though the process can go on for quite a 
long time without bringing ruin in its wake, 
the ultimate end ought to be visible to any 
intelligent manufacturer. Camped forever 
at his heels, the blood-sucking leech fattens 
itself into a swollen capitalization over which 
the employer has no control. But he has to 
pay. The dividend has to come out of pro- 
duction. All commerce is dependent upon 
production, and hence it is upon production 
that the primary burden falls. The manu- 
facturer can and does distribute it. The 
merchant pays him more for his wares. The 
[ 74 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

customer pays the merchant more. But all 
the time it is production that is paying the 
bill. All the time, it is the producer who 
carries the burden. The fact that the money 
finally comes out of the pocket of the con- 
sumer makes no difference, for without pro- 
duction there would be no money in the 
pockets of the consumers. 

Thus it is to the manufacturer as though 
someone were continually watering his 
capital stock by a process which consisted of 
putting nothing whatever into his business, 
and yet of taking out fresh shares of stock 
every time the town grew in any direction, 
or the country grew, or the state grew, or the 
nation grew or even the world grew. The 
process is slow in some places ; very rapid in 
others. There are towns, for example, which 
have never felt the effect of increasing site 
values. There are others where large indus- 
tries have grown up over a period of years, 
or within even a few months, where slums, 
congestion, high rents, and general chaos 
have descended upon the town so swiftly that 
the community scarcely realized what had 
happened. On the whole, the community is 
pleased. Every one has made money. Real 
estate has increased in cost. The demand 
for building has grown. There are more 
[ 75 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

men and women to spend money in the stores 
and shops. It all looks like prosperity. In 
truth, the manufactLirer, who is alone re- 
sponsible for the boom, has had saddled upon 
his neck an extra cost of doing business 
which will presently appear in the demand 
of his workers for more wages to meet the 
higher cost of living. Why the higher cost? 
Because the speculators and land-owners 
have capitalized the necessities of the hour 
into a huge sum upon which the manufac- 
turer must pay a dividend. He does not 
pay it to them direct. He pays it to his 
workers who then pay it to the holders of 
this watered stock. These land-holders, who 
claim their rights just as though they were 
stockholders, have put absolutely nothing 
into the manufacturer's business. They have 
contributed nothing whatever to its advan- 
tage or towards its success. They have 
simply been leeches sucking the blood from 
his business. The manufacturer does not 
realize this. He is accustomed to the general 
belief that rising land costs are an infallible 
indication of prosperity. Besides, he is very 
busy with his plant. He is occupied with the 
thousand details of starting or running a 
business. He is not interested in houses for 
his workers. He has always believed that a 
[ 76 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

housing demand would be met with a hous- 
ing supply. He is willing to leave that to 
those who make a business of houses. And 
they are very willing to have it left to them. 
It is only after a while that the manufacturer 
discovers what has happened. Then, he re- 
sorts to the pyramiding process as his only 
method of meeting the demand for higher 
wages. He may hold out against paying 
them, but in the end he will have to give in. 
His business has gone the way of all others, 
into the pyramid system, there to stay until 
the question of international trade sets up a 
condition where pyramiding will not answer 
the problem. The world is very near that 
condition today. 

Is it not time to take account of stock? 
Is it not time for Production to find out 
where it is going? Is it not time to ask how 
much longer the pyramiding process can go 
on? It is the Producer who must ask. The 
Consvmier meets his problem by demanding 
more wages from the Producer with which 
to meet his rising cost of living. The Pro- 
ducer meets his problem by fixing a higher 
price on his productions. How much longer 
can he go on fixing a higher price? 

The merchant, or distributor, who comes 
in between producer and consumer, can 
[ 77 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

solve his problem by raising his prices. No 
other course is left to him. He may- 
grumble, in many cases, and with reason, 
where he is compelled to accept a higher cost 
price while his selling price is fixed. But 
on the whole, he takes care of himself. He 
has no direct interest in the stock-watering 
process that dogs the heels of the manu- 
facturer. He leaves that problem to the 
manufacturer. And in the meantime, a cer- 
tain group of men who own land, or who deal 
in land, are able to enjoy a financial return 
based utterly upon the efforts of others. The 
problem is not an individual one, nor a local 
one. It is a national problem, and upon its 
solution depends the ability of the American 
manufacturer to keep our economic machine 
in shape to meet the economic machinery of 
other countries in the markets of the world. 
And to meet other grave problems as well. 

There are also many inter-reactions in this 
stock-watering process. Higher wages al- 
ways mean a rise in the cost of production, 
and thus the users of raw materials may have 
their costs raised through production con- 
ditions a thousand miles away. All of these 
inter-reactions are continually increasing 
the cost of everything, although scientific re- 
search and mechanical progress are continu- 
[ 78 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

ally increasing the volume of per capita 
production. 

Scientific volume production ought to 
make things grow continually cheaper; in- 
stead, they grow continually dearer. The 
larger part of the benefit derived from im- 
proved methods and the contributions of 
scientific research are more than swallowed 
up by the increased cost of labor, due to the 
increased cost of living, due to the dividends 
demanded upon the watered stock which 
piles up wherever the activities of men are 
centralized in a community. Instead of gain- 
ing by its unparalleled achievements in 
science and mechanics, the whole industry 
of the world is actually losing, so far as it is 
a benefit to the progress of men. The charge 
for using the surface of the earth to live on 
grows higher every year. 

In the meantime, the pressure of life 
grows. The pace becomes more feverish at 
every step. Both master and workman are 
caught in the same net. They are contend- 
ing against an enemy whom they will not 
recognize and yet whose shadow stalks past 
them like a ghost. The capital stock of the 
manufacturing industry is not only being 
watered, but the capital stock of our agricul- 
tural industry is watered equally and just as 
[ 79 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

continuously. In truth, we are watering the 
capital stock of the nation, which is our land. 
We are making it a more expensive part of 
our production plant every day, every 
month, every year. The process never ceases. 
It is retarded here and there, by the rise and 
fall of certain industries. Site values de- 
cline in some places, but they do not relieve 
the rising charge on land, for they generally 
represent areas that quickly deteriorate, gen- 
erally end in becoming slums, cut down tax- 
able values, and merely help to add to the 
burden saddled upon improved land. 

In his message to Congress, cabled from 
Paris, President Wilson said these things: 
''There is now in fact a real community of 
interest between capital and labor, but it has 
never been made evident in action. It can 
be made operative and manifest only in a 
new organization of industry. The genius 
of our business men and the sound practical 
sense of our workers can certainly work such 
a partnership out when once they realize 
exactly what it is they seek, and sincerely 
adopt a common purpose with regard to it. 
. . . But the new spirit and method of 
organization which must be effected are 
not to be brought about by legislation so 
much as by the common counsel and volun- 

[ 80 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

tary co-operation of capitalist, manager and 
workman. . . . Those who really desire a 
new relationship between capital and labor 
can readily find a way to bring it about ; and 
perhaps federal legislation can help more 
than state legislation could.' ^ 

If these words of the President seem to 
shed much light on the questions at issue, 
they who see should be grateful for the il- 
lumination. To be sure, the President does 
in other paragraphs refer to some of the 
agencies through which he thinks this new 
community of interest may be brought into 
being but his references are in the main to 
those agencies already in existence, and 
which, however much they have accom- 
plished, can in no way prevail. A more pow- 
erful agency than they stands between the 
dream and the reality. Between capital 
which seeks a fair profit, and workmen who 
seek a fair wage, stands the rising cost prob- 
lem. The manufacturer has his rising cost 
of production. The workman has his rising 
cost of living. Round and round they chase 
each other in a vicious circle, while the 
owners of land plunge their hands first into 
the pockets of one and then into the pockets 
of the other. These land owners may, and 
generally do, belong to the possessing class, 
[ 81 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

and often to the manufacturers themselves, 
but the class makes no difference. Wher- 
ever men turn, to work, to live, to play, up 
goes the cost of doing either, and still the 
pious-minded point out the ''community of 
interest," without ever touching upon the 
basic nature of that gentle platitude. Pres- 
ident Wilson could render no greater ser- 
vice to his country than by explaining what 
he means by "community of interest," and 
then by telling us how to make it both vivid 
to all and attainable by all. 

Suppose, that just by way of change, 
that very elusive "community of interest" 
should be captured, confined, studied and at 
last recognized as the combined effort of 
employer and laborer to put an end to the 
process of rifling their pockets! Suppose 
that by way of setting about the attainment 
of cost reduction in production, and that bet- 
ter share for labor, a way was found to elimi- 
nate the watered stock and the slyly stolen 
dividends filched from both capital and 
labor. 

The Mayor of Seattle, in an address de- 
livered at the convention of the National 
Manufacturers' Association in New York 
City on May 21, 1919, said: "Labor must be 
satisfied, must have good living conditions, 
and must receive the highest possible re- 
[ 82 ] 



THE HOUSING QUESTION 

muneration." One may be excused for sus- 
pecting that these words are more in the na- 
ture of a bid for the labor vote than they are 
an intelhgent exposition of the problem be- 
fore American industry. That problem is 
the increase of production, the decrease of 
production cost and a fixed higher wage for 
workers. How can workers secure "the 
highest possible remuneration/' when a part 
of that remuneration is continually being di- 
verted from them by those who are able to 
capitalize every human effort into increased 
charges for the use of the land on which they 
work, on which they live, and on which they 
play (if they get the chance). But the 
Mayor of Seattle is an orator, not an 
economist. 

This is where the housing problem begins 
and ends. All efforts to solve it with tene- 
ment house laws, municipal credits. Govern- 
ment loans, cheap forms of construction, or 
wholesale building operations, recoil de- 
feated and checked before the fact that 
wherever men go, whatever they essay to do, 
the owners of land immediately capitalize 
their wants or desires or intentions into a 
charge upon the use of land. This process 
cannot go on much longer without bringing 
dangerous and even revolutionary conse- 
quences. 

[ 83 ] 



V 

THE TWO PLANTS 

LET us try to state the house problem in 
yet simpler terms. Let us try to show 
its real relation to what manufac- 
turers call their plant. Now, plant is a 
word that covers a good deal. It means 
first of all land; then buildings, ma- 
chinery, and equipment of all kinds. The 
manufacturer thinks of his plant in such 
terms, and he thinks that his plant is 
limited by the land arid buildings he 
occupies. He does not think that he has any 
direct interest in the great plant outside his 
walls or gates. He may think so, perhaps, 
if he owns land or buildings from which he 
derives a rental, or he may think so if the 
town proposes to spend a lot of money for 
improvements and thus raise the taxes. 
Then, vaguely, he feels the connection be- 
tween the general plant outside his walls, 
and his own particular plant that is within 
those walls. 

But until such an occasion arises and there 
[ 84 ] 



THE TWO PLANTS 

is a plain and direct interference with his 
profits, the manufacturer does not think of 
the word plant as embracing anything be- 
side his own manufacturing property. But 
just as the manufacturer has to have build- 
ings and machinery, so does he have to have 
workers. The workers, in their turn, have 
to have another plant quite outside the plant 
in which they work. They have to have a 
plant where they may live, rear families, get 
some amusement, and a little enjoyment out 
of life. They, in their turn, do not feel the 
connection between this plant of theirs, 
which is represented by houses, streets, back- 
yards, refuse heaps, stores, ''movies," 
churches, street railways, telegraph poles, 
bill-boards, and the like, to the plant in which 
they work, and the economic system of which 
they are a part. They do not understand 
that the cost of supporting both the plant in 
which they live and the plant in which they 
work, has to be paid out of their pockets. It 
has to be paid with money, it is true, and the 
only way they can get any money is by work- 
ing for it. But the workman, when he is con- 
fronted with a demand upon him for more 
money as a payment for his right to occupy 
the plant where he lives, for the food he eats, 
the clothes he wears, does not understand 
[ 85 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

where the extra payment goes. Somehow or 
other, he feels that things have gone up, 
that's all. ''Gone up" represents a pretty 
regular condition, and he knows that the 
only remedy is for his wages to go up like- 
wise. 

But when the manufacturer receives the 
demand for higher wages, he, too, fails to 
realize that they are asked for because the 
cost of operating the plant outside his works 
has gone up. He still does not see the con- 
nection between the two plants. He still 
fails to realize that the other plant is in re- 
ality a part of his plant, that he is just as 
much affected by what happens to it as he 
is affected by what happens to his own plant. 
He still fails to perceive that the cost of 
carrying on the plant where his workers live 
has gone up because the non-producers, in 
the shape of land-owners, have again slipped 
their hands into the pockets of his workmen. 
They have arranged to charge a little more 
for the privilege of living on the land, and 
of doing business on the land. In other 
words, they are watering the stock of the 
manufacturer's plant by making it cost more 
for people to live. You cannot tear the two 
plants apart — only most manufacturers do 
not yet realize it. 

[ 86 ] 



THE TWO PLANTS 

These things do not happen to all, but 
scarcely an employer of any size has failed 
to pass through the experience. As a whole, 
manufacturing, including industry of all 
kinds and agriculture as well, has had a 
steadily increasing tribute wrung from it, 
without ever suspecting how it was done, 
ever since the country began to have any 
agriculture or any industry. This, again, is 
the real meaning of the housing problem. 
It means that houses are a part of the manu- 
facturer's plant. It means that they are an 
indispensable part of our national plant and 
industrial life. It means that just as they 
are given over to speculation, that just as 
every fresh building operation is used to in- 
crease the cost of unimproved land, that just 
as a housing shortage is used to raise rents, 
that just as every town or municipal under- 
taking is the signal for building site values to 
be raised, that just as the men who own land 
and produce absolutely nothing and render 
no service of any kind are allowed to demand 
and collect a continually increasing dividend 
from those who invest their capital in in- 
dustry and those who sell their labor in in- 
dustry, then just so long is there no possible 
way of solving the housing problem, nor, by 
the same token, is there any way of ever 
[ 87 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

paying a higher wage, a wage that will buy 
more things not only now, but five years 
from now, or twenty years in the future. 
That is the amazing fact which stares us in 
the face. For, how can we ever pay a higher 
wage, when someone who never works comes 
along and demands every cent of the in- 
crease, sooner or later. That is just what 
happens. If a workman is receiving $15.00 
a week, and he gets a raise to $16.00, of what 
avail is the raise when the dollar advance he 
secures, and generally a few cents more 
along with it, are sniped away from him by 
an increased cost of living? And for what 
is the increase demanded? When science 
and mechanics both have steadily operated 
to increase the amount of any one thing that 
an individual can produce, whether it be 
automobiles or onions, why do those things 
keep on costing more and more? 

Does it not seem strange that intelligent 
business men will not see where the trouble 
lies? It may not seem so strange that work- 
ing men do not see, and that they are con- 
tinually striving for a higher wage and 
shorter hours. Their leaders do not see. We 
have very few real economists among the 
ranks of our labor leaders, — very few, in- 
deed. It is our misfortune to have few such 
[ 88 ] 



THE TWO PLANTS 

leaders as there are in England, where it is 
not easy to find a manufacturer who is as 
well grounded in the science of economics as 
are some of the men who lead the workers. 
There, it is evident that the truth has been 
seen. Here, it is palpable that the truth, if 
it has been seen, is carefully shrouded in a 
mask of platitudes, such as ''community of 
interest," "public service," ''a better world," 
''a fairer share," "full dinner pail," and the 
like. All of these things mean nothing and 
the people who utter them can neither trans- 
late them into understandable words, nor 
can they point the way to any realization of 
the vague moralities they think they have in 
mind. The plain fact is, that as long as the 
cost of living on the surface of the earth is 
raised faster than the profits from produc- 
tion can earn that extra cost, there is no way 
of paying a higher wage. It cannot be done, 
and those who seek some way of doing it by 
setting up all kinds of instruments for work- 
men's committees, shop conmiittees, concilia- 
tion boards, and such like, are bringing us 
no nearer to a solution of the difficulty. 

It is true that organized labor has secured 
higher wages for a small minority of 
workers, but this has only been done by per- 
mitting the manufacturer, who paid the 
[ 89 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

higher wage, to charge it back on his prod- 
ucts. Thus the higher wage so paid was 
paid, in reahty, by the general consumer, in 
the form of an increased cost of living. But, 
when all workers, whether of hand or brain, 
organize to secure a higher wage, as they 
have been doing more and more of late, the 
system bursts. It cannot stand up. It is 
built on a rotten foundation, and no effort to 
patch it will avail for long. There must be 
a new foundation — a new and fairer 
method of dividing the profits of industry, 
— and of eliminating the sly thieving of the 
non-producer. 

The statement of the Miners' Federation 
of England, when it made its now famous 
demand for "a 30% increase in wages, a 40- 
hour week, and nationalization of the mines," 
indicates the economic progress which the 
workers of England have made. ''This is 
not a demand to secure for us and our fam- 
ilies a decent living condition and a relief 
from the intolerable privations and hardships 
which we have had to bear," said the miners. 
''We know very well that we might negoti- 
ate with our present employers and get a 
higher wage and a shorter week, but we also 
know perfectly well that whatever increase 
we obtained in our wages, would be added to 
[ 90 ] 



THE TWO PLANTS 

the cost of coal. In turn, that added cost of 
coal would be added by all the other manu- 
facturers who make the things we need, and 
so, in a very short while, our increased wages 
would buy us no more than our present wage 
will buy, and probably a little less. We know 
this from long experience. Therefore, we 
ask for nationalization of the mines. We be- 
lieve that if the mines were operated in the 
interest of the country as a whole, if compe- 
tition were suppressed, if distribution were 
arranged along natural lines, and if the right 
labor-saving machinery were introduced, 
there could be saved enough in the mining 
and distribution of coal to more than pay 
the wage increase we ask. Then we would 
have secured a real wage raise, for there 
would be no increase in the cost of coal. We 
could preserve the increase we had won, 
because others would not raise their prices, 
and we could buy more with our wage, and 
continue to buy more with it." 

This is all so simple that it seems scarcely 
necessary to add more. Of course it is true 
that in actual fact the miners wage increase 
would slowly lose some of its added purchas- 
ing power unless other industries were put 
on the same basis. Coal, though a big factor 
in industry, is not the only item, and before 
[ 91 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

there can be any real raise in wages such as 
will actually give and preserve to the worker 
an increased purchasing power, some way 
must be found to tie the hands of the non- 
producers who are today well entrenched in 
all lands, and who have the right by law, the 
sanction by tradition, the power by occu- 
pancy and possession, to keep on adding an 
increased charge for the use of land. 

No assertion is made that the increments 
on land are the only unearned increments; 
but the others are small in comparison, al- 
though quite aside from those which may re- 
sult from cornered markets, failure of crops, 
secret price cutting, and other similar de- 
vices, there are also the huge increments 
from natural resources lying below the sur- 
face of the earth. During the month of 
May, 1919, in England, when the Coal Com- 
mission was taking testimony in order to de- 
termine how the coal mines of England 
should be operated in the future (its pre- 
vious report having utterly condemned the 
system of the past) it was made clear that 
the Marquis of Bute, for example, held 
128,528 acres of land, of which 48,878 acres 
carried proved mineral rights, and from 
which the annual royalties on coal mined 
were about $575,000. Under examination 
[ 92 ] 



THE TWO PLANTS 

it was also pointed out that King Edward 
VI was between 10 and 14 years of age when 
he signed the document under which there 
was conferred upon Sir William Herbert, 
himself an executor of the will of Henry 
VIII, the huge grant of land in question. 
''Do you know," said Mr. Hodges to the 
Marquis of Bute, ''it has been suggested that 
Sir William Herbert granted the lands to 
himself, using the boy king's name in order 
to enrich himself, and that he was charged 
with equal rapacity in regard to large areas 
in other parts of England, with the result 
that literally millions of money has been paid 
in revenue to those who have inherited that 
property as the outcome of 'that gigantic 
fraud?' " 

Other tremendous holdings, with corre- 
spondingly tremendous revenues were re- 
vealed, but they are mentioned here only in 
connection with the problem of unearned in- 
crements and their relation to wage increases 
and housing. In respect to the latter, the 
housing conditions in the mining centers of 
the world are too well known to require 
comment. The lives of the men below 
ground, under conditions that would appall 
the stoutest heart, were it not beating in the 
breast of a race that has been forced to ac- 
[ 93 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

cept these conditions as the price of its exist- 
ence, are in no sense less pleasurable than 
the lives of the wives and children who in- 
habit the slums made necessary through the 
pilfering of their wage by the non-pro- 
ducers. It is not for nothing that the miners 
of England have been studying their prob- 
lem as one of applied economics, and not as 
one that revolved about a senseless struggle 
for the higher wage that has been discovered 
to be a mirage — a rainbow, with no pot of 
gold at its end, but only the barren result 
of a futile struggle. 

Everywhere, throughout the world, where 
Governments have struggled with the hous- 
ing problem, they have gradually come to 
see that there was no solution until some way 
of land control could be devised. In Queens- 
land, for example, Mr. Ryan testifying be- 
fore the Coal Commission of England in 
May, 1919, with respect to the state opera- 
tion of mines in that province of Australia, 
stated that the land owned by the State 
could no longer be sold to an individual. It 
may only be leased, the Crown retaining the 
title, and thereby enjoying the benefit that 
may accrue through any increases in value. 

In other parts of Australia, and in New 
Zealand, the State owns large areas of land 
that cannot be diverted to private holders. 
[ 94 ] 



THE TWO PLANTS 

The operation of the housing law is so 
simple in New Zealand that any workman of 
good character can make an application at 
any post-office for a loan with which to build 
a house. He pays less than two dollars on 
filing the application, and that is the only 
fee he has to pay. If he is adjudged a 
worthy risk, the State makes the loan at low 
interest. If he has no land, the State will 
rent him land, and, in some areas, will sell it 
to him. 

On this point it again should be made clear 
that there is no way of preventing the use 
value of land from rising. Neither is it 
harmful that it should rise. Wherever men 
congregate, more business is to be done. 
The more business that can be transacted 
on a given piece of land, the more the user of 
that land can afford to pay for its use. The 
harm lies in the collection of the charge by 
an individual, who does nothing, produces 
nothing, adds nothing, but who by sheer 
right of possession is entitled to collect a 
use charge for that land, and to raise that 
use charge just as fast and just as high as 
the traffic will bear. The problem before 
the world is to change this system. It lies at 
the bottom of most of the social and eco- 
nomic problems with which men are contin- 
ually wrestling. 

[95 ] 



VI 

WHAT ARE THE POSSIBLE 

WAYS OUT OF THE 

DILEMMA IN 

HOUSING? 

AT THIS moment, all over the United 
States, amateur financiers and hous- 
ing reformers are clamoring for Gov- 
ernment aid in housing. Many towns and 
cities have allowed themselves to drift into 
such a state that they can see no way out of 
the situation. Money is not available for 
housing, because building costs are high, the 
future is uncertain, and even with a strong 
demand for housing and the possibility of 
high rents, private capital is still reluctant 
to make the venture. Institutions that com- 
monly lend money on this kind of enterprise 
appear to be equally loath to part with their 
funds. The real answer probably lies in the 
fact that there has come to be a very general 
understanding of the fact that without an 
inflation of rental values such as would be 
[ 96 ] 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

extortionate, there is now no way known 
by which good houses can be built to rent 
for a small sum and pay a profit on the in- 
vestment. When all is said and done, this 
is the secret that has finally wormed its way 
out. England discovered it a long time ago, 
and as has already been explained, prefers 
to subsidize the building of houses rather 
than run the risk of popular upheaval, if the 
houses are not provided, or if speculators 
are allowed to take control of the situation 
and try to put the workers of England back 
into the old slums from which so many of 
them came forth to fight in the war, or into 
new slums to be built cheaply and rented at 
high rates. 

But in view of the fact that land in our 
cities has reached a figure, for house build- 
ing sites, such as is prohibitive for houses 
for low-wage or low-salary workers, what 
can be done? 

One suggested way, as has been said, is 
for the State to advance sums of money at 
low rates of interest. The experience of 
other countries is pointed out, in that con- 
nection, but those who point it out do not 
allude to the whole of the experience. They 
make out a case for Government loans, 
which can easily be done, but unless such 
[ 97 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

loans are accompanied with intelligent legis- 
lation providing for land control, the money 
lent by the Government (Federal, State or 
Municipal) merely serves to alleviate the 
temporary condition. In the end, the vicious 
circle is travelled with a rise in land values 
to complete it and thus block further 
progress. But a temporary alleviation 
may be necessary. It may be absolutely im- 
perative, in which case little can be done 
except to satisfy the immediate need for 
houses. 

But even in so doing, the State should 
look ahead and see what the result is likely to 
be. Take New York City, for example. 
Suppose that it were provided with any- 
where from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 at 
low rate of interest, which could be used to 
build houses. Even to achieve any tempo- 
rary benefit, it would be necessary to find 
cheap land, to begin with, and it is by no 
means certain that even on cheap land it 
would be possible to build houses or apart- 
ments, within the rental reach of thousands 
of the workers of New York City. It is 
almost certain that if decent houses were 
built, with anything approaching a fair 
measure of light, air, and convenience, that 
somebody would lose money on the trans- 
[ 98 ] 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

action. Our situation is no better than Eng- 
land's. We are in the same boat, as far as 
house-building is concerned. 

If the State would agree to write off any 
loss, as represented by the difference be- 
tween the cost of the houses as built today 
and their value in five years under the then 
existing conditions, very likely there would 
be a rush to use the State's funds. The City 
of New York might make such an agree- 
ment, as a last resort. Other cities may be 
driven to it before we are out of the present 
dilemma, for every city of any size in the 
United States is in about the same predica- 
ment, and the shortage of houses is national 
in scope. 

We have thousands of houses that ought 
to be scrapped, immediately, as unfit for 
human habitation. We are under-built, in 
houses, as a result of the building decline 
previous to and during the war. In some 
cases, local conditions are more favorable 
than in others, and then it is possible to 
stimulate house-building. In other places, 
it is impossible to stimulate such building, 
except by organized effort. As it is always 
doubtful whether money can be secured from 
the State, even after long delay, then it is 
sometimes proposed that wealthy men 
[ 99 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

should form a syndicate to provide the 
funds. But here again, there is a failure to 
recognize the fact that such action will pro- 
vide only a temporary relief, and a short- 
lived one at that, although a private syndi- 
cate might exercise a more beneficial result 
than the State, for it could engage upon a 
transaction on a very large scale, if it were 
so minded, without waiting for the enact- 
ment of legislation. 

Suppose, for example, that the City of 
New York could acquire all the vacant land 
within its area. The City of New York is 
used by way of illustration only; the ex- 
ample in mind is practicable for every city, 
if it has or can obtain the power to buy and 
hold for business or residential purposes. 
But if New York City could do such a thing, 
then it could perhaps extricate itself from 
its present situation. Naturally, it would 
have to acquire the land at a fair valuation 
and not at an inflated price, but the interest 
charge for carrying it would be more than 
paid by the rise in value of the land. The 
rise for residential purposes ought to be very 
little; the rise for business purposes would 
be sure and steady, and the extra amount 
produced by the rental of such land would 
carry the financial burden of whatever loan 
[ 100 ] 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

was necessary in order to make the original 
purchase. 

Then the City of New York would have 
absolute control of the housing problem 
within its own area. That would not be 
enough, eventually, and a logical law would 
permit the acquisition of land outside the 
city area, as well. If such land can be taken 
for the purpose of a water supply or a sew- 
age plant, there would seem to be no valid 
reason why it could not be taken for con- 
serving humans. By such a process, it might 
soon be apparent that the expenditures for 
jails, hospitals, sanitariums and such make- 
shift arrangements were decreasing, and 
that the City of New York and the State of 
New York had really started a movement 
that was business-like in the last degree. In- 
stead of plunging themselves deeper and 
deeper in debt every year, in providing for 
the human by-products of their slums, they 
would use the money to stop the increasing 
flow of such by-products. Today, millions 
go for the broken, diseased and cast-off; but 
only a very little goes to decreasing the num- 
ber of these. But with the increased value of 
land flowing back into the treasury of the 
city or the State, the housing problem would 
be ended forever. It will never be ended, 

[ 101 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

but will grow steadily worse, until the use 
value of land is given back to those who 
create it. 

But it is beyond the dreams of the most 
visionary idealist that the City of New York 
will do such a thing, or that the State of New 
York would either do it itself or allow the 
city to do it. That is the reason why it 
might be possible for a group of wealthy in- 
terests to do what the State cannot or will 
not do, but what must be done by somebody. 
If it sounds like a Bold step, then it may be 
well to remember that there are many Bold 
things that begin with a B, only some of 
them are bad. We do not wish to settle the 
housing problem, and others, by the bad 
method, if it can be avoided. But the solu- 
tion must be based upon a clear understand- 
ing of the economics of land use and tenure, 
and if a group of interests could be given 
such an understanding and could see the wis- 
dom of trying to forestall any such condition 
as now throttles Europe, they could acquire 
vast areas of land, on the agreement that the 
returns to themselves or the corporation they 
formed should in no case be more than 5%. 
The new English Housing Bill does provide 
that such groups may limit their dividends 
to not more than 6%, but the less the divi- 
[ 102 ] 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

dend the better the result in the long run, 
although it is not a point about which to 
quibble. 

Such a corporation would aim at two 
things: To preserve the value of building 
sites as near a non-fluctuating basis as pos- 
sible, and to make the use value of land 
wanted for business purposes help pay the 
taxes and the cost of the annual interest 
charge for carrying the land. Its members 
would be rendering a service to their city 
the value of which is beyond calculation. 
They would perhaps be able to save it from 
a graver peril than that which now con- 
fronts it, for it is certain that if our cities 
become so top-heavy and unworkable that 
the cost of living and doing business there in- 
creases at a greater proportionate rate than 
elsewhere, such cities will cease to grow. 

There can be no gainsaying the fact that 
it would be to the interest of the whole 
country if our cities did cease to grow 
as they are at present growing. We do not 
want larger cities, but better cities, and bet- 
ter cities we shall undoubtedly get, in some 
manner. But the process of stopping fur- 
ther centralization and of setting up decen- 
tralization ought to be a gradual one. There 
should be time for readjustments, and no 
[ 103 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

violent upsetting of many things that can- 
not be changed except gradually. 

But inasmuch as it is very probable that 
no group of financial interests will care to 
engage upon such a transaction, foregoing 
the rich profits from the rise in land values, 
— profits which are so traditionally accepted 
as the most luscious and juicy of all — what 
is the next thing to be done? Take some of 
the population out of New York City, of 
course ! 

Already, there are manufacturers and 
groups of manufacturers in New York City 
and in other large cities, who are asking 
themselves whether that is not the answer. 

In England, one huge industry is already 
at work upon plans for the establishment of 
six new plants removed from existing large 
industrial centers. The management have 
seen that only by an entirely new conception 
of industry, can their business be assured of 
permanence. Their intention is to build 
several complete plants, including the towns, 
which will be operated not by the manufac- 
turers, but by the tenants. 

The manufacturer simply lends the money 

with which to buy the land and build the 

town, taking only a nominal rate of interest 

for his loan. The tenants, paying back the 

[ 104 ] 



i 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

loan as fast as they can, become the ultimate 
communal owners of the underlying land 
on which the town is built. In some cases 
the loan for the land is financed separately 
from the loans for building. There are 
many variations of plan, as to finance and 
administration, but they are all based upon 
the principle of securing the rise in the use 
value of land for those who create it, as is 
now the case in the Garden Cities and the 
Co-partnership Tenants undertakings. 

What does this mean? It means that it 
will be very difiicult for any outside interest 
to be watering the capital stock of the man- 
ufacturers. It means that they will have 
established a living plant for their workers 
where values will be highly stabilized, which 
means in turn, that wages will be highly 
stabilized. It means that by the application 
of engineering and architectural skill, these 
communities will be the most pleasant and 
enjoyable to be found anywhere in England. 
They will have central heat from the works 
plant, and central hot-water distribution 
likewise. They wiU have all the conven- 
iences that go with the best kind of modern 
apartment, and will have a garden as well, 
with open space for the children and the 
boys and girls, and even for the fathers and 
[ 105 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

mothers, on evenings and holidays. The 
communities will in no sense be paternalistic, 
and nobody in them will own any land or 
any house. Yet the right to live there will 
be conferred, as long as one pays the annual 
rental and behaves in a decent and orderly 
manner. No one can make any money out 
of land speculation, and at the same time, no 
one can lose any. Rents, instead of being 
raised, will likely be lowered. 

Why are not the manufacturers in all 
parts of the United States alive to the bene- 
fits to be derived from this kind of a plant, 
where the non-producers are largely extin- 
guished and where the process of production 
earns a profit which can be divided between 
employer and employee, without having a 
toll taken away from it by the land-sniping 
process ? That is the answer that many man- 
ufacturers in New York can make to the 
housing problem. It is the answer that many 
of them will have to make, in the future, for 
the cost of doing business in New York City 
is not going to decline — at least not until 
there is a complete reorganization of taxa- 
tion and land tenure, and until a more rigor- 
ous zoning law takes the place of the pres- 
ent compromise made in the interest of realty 
interests. It is true that the present zoning 
[ 106 ] 



II 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

law does aim at decreasing land speculation 
and the disasters that follow, by restricting 
the purposes for which land may be used or 
occupied, but what is needed is a new zoning 
law based upon something else beside the 
giving away of land values ; imtil such a law 
is enacted no great change is possible, either 
in housing or anything else. 

Our states could do all of these things 
that have been proposed as measures look- 
ing toward the setting up of cooperatively 
owned communities and the control of land. 
Other countries have done it, and more are 
preparing to do it, yet one hesitates to be- 
lieve that any such intelligent action can be 
had in this country, at the present time, and 
with our present political system. We shall 
have to wait and pass through all the expe- 
riences of the others before the eyes of the 
country will be opened, and State action be 
made possible, for it is, after all, a national 
consciousness that must be awakened. 

England's method of granting a direct 
subsidy from the national treasury is not the 
only wrong way. The Special Housing 
Committee of the Merchants' Association of 
New York in reporting the result of their 
study of the housing question in New York 
City, lay special emphasis on the fact that the 
[ 107 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

way to set the building of houses in motion is 
to provide funds. The way to provide funds, 
says the Committee, is to provide that the 
holder of mortgages be exempted ''from in- 
come tax and surtaxes of interest on a cer- 
tain amount of mortgage holdings in any 
taxpayer's hands, say, $40,000. This is a 
well-known and perfectly legitimate induce- ^ 
ment to capital." i 

The report concludes with a resolution 
that Congress be immediately urged to grant 
such relief. 

To many it may not appear that this form 
of exemption is "perfectly legitimate" ex- 
cept that anything is legitimate when the 
need is so great that special favors no longer 
appear illegitimate. But it would have been 
fairer if the Committee in question had con- 
cluded with an explanation along these lines : 

''The housing situation in New York City 
is desperate and demands relief. We believe 
that relief can be obtained by freeing capi- 
tal for building loans. In order to do this we 
propose that capital lent for building be ex- 
empted from certain Federal taxes. It may 
not be perfectly fair to provide a special ex- 
emption for a certain class, but the neces- 
sity is too urgent to wait. Something must 
be done, and we believe that this exemption 
[ 108 ] 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

of such capital from taxes will make it pos- 
sible to build more houses. At the same 
time, we call the attention of the people of 
New York City to the fact that what we are 
proposing is merely a temporary relief. We 
have not offered a permanent cure, and it is 
very likely that under our system of giving 
away land values to private owners, the 
amount of money raised for building by such 
tax exemptions will only have the effect of 
raising land values still higher, so that in the 
end we shall be worse off than we are now, 
when it comes to the next acute attack of 
high rents and shortage of houses. But as 
you are not at present ready to change the 
present system of land ownership and taxa- 
tion, and as it would take some time to do it, 
we think you had better accept our sugges- 
tion as a measure of relief for this particular 
case. Only, we counsel you to change the 
present system of giving away land values, 
very quickly, for until you do it, there can 
be no permanent relief for the housing situ- 
ation in New York City." 

It is true that the difficulty of dealing with 
this question is greater here than in Eng- 
land. There, as has already been stated, 
land-ownership is never dreamed of by the 
average workman, and indeed but by only a 
[ 109 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

few of the favored class. As a consequence, 
the scheme of co-partnership in house and 
land ownership makes a strong appeal, for 
it is, when all is said and done, a step in ad- 
vance. It is at least a part ownership where 
no ownership was looked for. In this coun- 
try, on the contrary, land and house owner- 
ship are the usual aspiration of a great ma- 
jority of workmen, and of all the salaried 
class. Thus it is that copartnership in home 
owning seems a step backward. It is part 
ownership where whole ownership was 
looked for. Against this very obvious psy- 
chology, it may be difficult to contend, but 
not impossible. The economics of the ques- 
tion can be so simply demonstrated, that it 
will not take long for men to see the benefits 
to be derived. Particularly will the proposal 
seem favorable, if it can be pointed out that 
there are no paternalistic features connected 
with the plan, and that there is to be a really 
democratic form of administration with dis- 
tinct economic benefits as time goes on. 

There are various methods of starting and 
of administering a co-partnership scheme, 
but the history of them is easily available for 
whoever cares to look into the matter. Dif- 
ferent customs may sanction different meth- 
ods, but in general, any beginning must de- 

[ 110 ] 



THE DILEMMA IN HOUSING 

pend upon a group of men who have the 
vision to see that from a limited dividend 
on a land-holding plan there can be 
derived immeasurable benefits through the 
stabilization of values, the stabilization of 
wages, the contentment of workers, and the 
great degree of comfort and convenience 
that are made possible in this way, and 
which, indeed, cannot be made possible in 
any other way to those who earn only a small 
or moderate wage. 

The battle is between the Producer and 
the Non-Producer. Two forces are arrayed 
against each other and only one can sur- 
vive. It must be Production, for Non-Pro- 
duction cannot live except upon the profits 
of the body from which it sucks the blood. 
And those who are engaged in Production 
cannot play the game at both ends. They 
cannot be taking money and profits through 
non-production, and through production as 
well. The temptation is great, and even 
irresistible to most men, but the Goose that 
lays the Golden Eggs is Production, no 
matter in what form it may be. The enemy 
that is bleeding the Goose to death is non- 
production, no matter in what form it may 
be — and of all the forces under which non- 
production exploits its trade, none drains 

[ 111 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

away the life-blood so swiftly and so surely 
as the power of charging humanity more and 
more each year for the right to use the sur- 
face of the earth. 

The housing problem is thus a land prob- 
lem. It never was anything else. Even 
when humans were herded in walled cities 
where over-crowding was unavoidable, and 
escape was impossible, as long as the land 
went to him who was strongest in getting 
and holding it, the problem was still to free 
the use of land to men. Then it was to free 
it from organized Force in the shape of 
marauders armed with weapons to kill; to- 
day it is to free it from another and even 
more powerful force — the Force of Igno- 
rance enthroned in law and tradition, sol- 
emnly worshiped by the bulk of men, 
even when persistence in the belief throws 
the whole world into a convulsion and de- 
mands the sacrifice of millions of lives. 

How to use land in the interest and for 
the benefit of mankind is the greatest funda- 
mental physical problem before the whole 
world. 



[ 112 ] 



VII 

THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF 
LAND CONTROL 

THROUGHOUT the preceding chap- 
ters, the emphasis in the so-called 
housing problem has been laid upon 
its relation to industry, and primarily upon 
workers who are dependent upon labor of 
the hands. But the problem is equally acute 
in its relation to those who work with their 
brains. Indeed, it may be said that such 
workers find themselves in an even more 
difficult position, for they are largely unor- 
ganized, and therefore are unable to gain 
wage increases through concerted action. In 
the city of Washington, for example, the 
problem of brain-workers offers a very per- 
tinent commentary upon the effect of the 
pyramiding system on house rentals. Wash- 
ington is a city of brain- workers, essentially, 
for it possesses few industries, and even 
though rents rose, during the war period, to 
an unprecedented degree, and even though 

[ 113 ] 



: 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

this was due to the rapid influx of several 
hundred thousand war-workers, the fact re- 
mains that Washington had reached a point, 
before the war, where the cost of living had 
passed beyond the range of income of the 
average employee in Government service. 
This is conclusively shown by the investiga- 
tions of the Department of Labor, and is 
only another example of what unrestricted 
speculation in land will do to rentals, 
whether the renters be hand-workers or brain 
workers. 

Yet the plan of Washington is famous, in 
many respects, deservedly so. But when 
it was prepared by Major L'Enfant, plan- 
ning had not advanced to include the social 
requirements of a community. It still re- 
mained an infant art devoted to the beauti- 
ful and the grandiose, although the L'En- 
fant plan also provided excellently well for 
traffic routes and transportation. But it 
made no provision whatever for the physi- 
cal growth of the city, beyond laying out 
the main thoroughfares and indicating the 
residential streets of the future to a limited 
extent. The question of housing, for ex- 
ample, probably never entered into the cal- 
culations of L'Enfant, and as the years went 
by, the growing pains of Washington were 

[ 114 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

left to the delicate ministrations of the real 
estate speculators. 

The truth is that the L'Enfant plan 
lacked the one essential element which would 
have made Washington what today it is not 
— a completely beautiful city. That it is 
impressive beyond other American cities, is 
not to be gainsaid, but one cannot escape a 
feeling amounting almost to indignation, 
when one surveys the mars and scars 
wrought upon the city by unrestricted spec- 
ulation. It is not that the famous Washing- 
ton alleys are the equal of any slum sections 
in the country, nor that the Government, 
instead of adopting a carefully thought out 
plan for public buildings to provide for the 
constant increase of the government's busi- 
ness, has encouraged the erection of a series 
of unsightly buildings, by speculators, for 
the use of the Departments at exorbitant 
annual charges. The truth is, of course, that 
little political prestige is to be gained by 
Senators and Congressmen who vote money 
for the necessities of Washington, and also 
that the real estate owners have now a vital 
interest in seeing that the Government builds 
as few buildings as possible. As the whole 
rental values of the business section are 
largely dependent upon the huge sums spent 
[ 115 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

annually by the various departments for 
rents, the erection of suitable quarters by 
the Government would throw on the mar- 
ket, iromediately they were vacated by the 
Government, a considerable quantity of old 
buildings. As they could not be absorbed 
in a city where there is little industry or 
business, the whole rental basis of the busi- 
ness section would be disturbed. Hence the 
great difficulty of securing appropriations 
from Congress for the needed buildings, for 
the evidence seems conclusive that the real 
estate interests of Washington know how to 
protect themselves. But this is no indict- 
ment of persons ; again and again it must be 
remembered that it is a system which com- 
pels these things. 

There are aggravating factors to this situ- 
ation introduced by the war and the neces- 
sity for more buildings of a temporary na- 
ture, strewn all over the city, but the whole 
experience indicates that L'Enfant either 
ignored the necessity of providing some 
measure of land control, or else, admitting 
that he urged it, was unable to secure its 
adoption. It matters little who or what was 
responsible for the omission. The result 
has been to impose an almost insurmountable 
financial obstacle to the realization of Wash- 
[ 116 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

ington's needs as a capital city. Wherever 
the Government turns in its efforts to pro- 
vide for needed buildings, or to effect frag- 
mentary additions to the general esthetic 
scheme, it is met by a rolled-up billow of 
land values before which Congress recoils in 
dismay. Wherever the city seeks to spread 
in order to accommodate its fast increasing 
population, it too is confronted with the 
same barrier. The result is that the resi- 
dential districts stretch out in hopelessly 
commonplace rows of pretentious architec- 
tural sham, with a constantly increasing 
rental cost. So far as providing for the real 
and vital needs of a growing community, the 
L'Enfant plan has contributed nothing ex- 
cept a system of thoroughfares and charm- 
ing parks. 

Already there is an appeal to Congress 
for a zoning law to limit the use and occu- 
pancy of land and to restrict the height of 
buildings. Downtown Washington has 
been sadly scarred by the intrusion of high 
buildings and a jagged and ugly sky line, a 
tendency which has been much encouraged 
by the Government's hand-to-mouth policy 
of renting buildings instead of building 
them. As for the problem of housing 
in Washington, it may be said that the Gov- 

[ 117 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

ernment will some day have to interfere. It 
has done so, temporarily, under the stress of 
war. Later on, when the speculators have 
carried their ruinous policy to the bitter end, 
the Government will be obliged to come to 
the rescue.* But the question of how to pro- 
vide houses for the brain- workers in the De- 
partments at Washington is the same ques- 
tion for which an answer is sought all over 
the country, and in this connection we must 
prepare to reckon with a new element in the 
pyramid. 

As the brain-workers of England are be- 
ginning to organize, so also are the brain- 
workers of America. Organization is the 
only possible method of relief in sight, and 
yet, in truth, it only betokens further com- 
plications and another acceleration of the 
pyramiding system. Hitherto, as already 
has been pointed out, the additions to wages 
have largely been secured by the organized 
effort of hand workers. In the near future, 
we shall see the brain-workers forced to or- 
ganize on a larger scale, with the result that 
their organized demand for higher wages 
will be added to the demands of the hand- 
workers. Conceded by the employers, as the 
demand will have to be, since the brain- 

* See Appendix B. 
[ 118 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

workers are now finding the cost of liv- 
ing beyond their incomes, whatever addi- 
tion to their salaries they obtain will, in 
its turn, be projected into the pyramiding 
system. This will mean a further rise in the 
cost of living, and thus we shall continue to 
witness wages (or salaries) and the cost of 
living in an even more rapid and quite as 
futile race, the first to overtake the second, 
the second to elude the first. 

There may be fluctuations. Different 
cities may be affected to a different degree. 
Different parts of the country may have an 
acute attack of pyramiding, while in others 
it may be slow, or even imperceptible. On 
the whole, it will go on until another in- 
ternal war, born out of the hopeless attempts 
to bring any semblance of economic order 
out of the present system, again forces an- 
other great and rapid increase of prices with 
another consequent reduction of the pur- 
chasing power of the dollar. 

For, after all, what are the too oft re- 
curring wars, except blind efforts to change 
certain economic conditions or relationships? 
They may be inspired by the controlling 
classes of one or more countries, as a means 
to certain industrial or financial ends con- 
nected with trading rights, land holdings, 

[ 119 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

mining privileges, or any of the benefits for 
which men struggle. They may even be in- 
spired, as so many now believe to have been 
the ease in Germany, by an economic sys- 
tem which had been so built up around the 
theory of armed force that the cost of main- 
taining that armed force had risen to a point 
where it was necessary to convert the mili- 
tary machine into an active instrument that 
should produce profits. What were the 
profits to be? Indemnities, in one case, or 
market privileges in another. It is idle to 
assign the theory of war to lust for power 
alone; power is only valuable as it can be 
used to benefit those who possess it, and a 
war for more power is in reality a war for 
more profits through the control of power. 

In other words, the economic system of 
Germany had reached a point where it was 
threatened with bankruptcy, because it could 
not earn enough to keep up the machinery 
of war upon the possession of which it be- 
lieved its future to depend. I well remember 
the morning after the ultimatum was de- 
livered to Servia by Austria, for I spent the 
whole of that day, and most of the following 
night, travelling from Lyons in France to 
Cologne in Germany. I shared a carriage 
with a young German whose father oper- 
[ 120 ] 



\ 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

atedalarge works at Dusseldorf. This young 
man was on his way home from an extensive 
trip to North and South America, where he 
had been seeking a market for heavy east- 
ings. Now of all things difficult to export, 
heavy castings must stand at about the top 
of the list, so I inquired why he had been 
led to hope that he might find a market so 
far away. 

His answer was that it was a desperate 
chance, but that the industrial situation in 
Germany was in an intolerable condition. 
The war machine was strangling industry, 
first by withdrawing so many capable men 
from the ranks of production and thrusting 
the burden of their support on the producers, 
and second by the rapidly increasing cost of 
both building and maintaining the military 
machine. Germany was in the grip of the 
pyramiding system, like other countries, and 
she had experienced a sharp growth of the 
pyramid on account of her tremendous war 
expenditures, which were greater than her 
production could absorb. She had been 
driven to levying a tax on capital, in her 
frantic effort to strike a balance. 

When I asked what the ultimatum to Ser- 
via meant, he said that he feared it meant 
war. But in answer to my question as to 

[ 121 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

what effect the war would have on Germany 
he expressed the conviction that German 
industry was headed toward bankruptcy no 
matter what happened. Even if there were 
no war, they could not keep on and meet 
their obligations, and if there were, he saw 
no chance for Germany to emerge victorious 
and able to exact an indemnity that would 
both pay the war cost and help to meet the 
great national deficit between the profits of 
industry and the cost of keeping on with an 
even greater war machine. He even went so 
far as to record his belief that an indemnity, 
even if obtainable by Germany, would not 
help the situation, since he had been con- 
vinced by ''The Great Illusion," a copy of 
which he had in his bag, that indemnities 
could not be paid by one country alone with- 
out exacting a tax on the whole international 
financial structure. It was a memorable 
journey and our conversation indicated 
many underlying factors, as a cause of the 
war, which have since come to light. 

Again we have seen the revolutions of the 
past. Are they not comparable to the mo- 
ment when the bees organize their attack 
and put an end to the drones? Are not the 
great revolutions of the past very much like 
the battle in the hive? Are they not the 
[ 122 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

vague and uncertain efforts of the human 
producers to throw off the burden of the 
non-producers? The bees have learned that 
a rational existence is impossible if the non- 
producers are allowed to exist. The funda- 
mental aspects of human revolutions are not 
understood either by those who rebel or those 
who defend, yet underneath all lies a half- 
formed conviction on the part of the revolu- 
tionists, not yet thought out or reduced to a 
finality, but rightly connected with a sense 
of the injustice of the non-producer. That 
is why revolutions are never successful, even 
when they succeed. The basis of a new order 
has not been thought out. One group simply 
seeks to supplant another. Class is arrayed 
against class, with one side struggling 
vainly to upset a system it does not under- 
stand, and the other side seeking to defend a 
system which it will not inquire into, and 
which it will fight to continue independent of 
the accumulated evidence of the centuries, all 
bearing witness to the fact that the system 
cannot endure. When either side learns the 
true nature of the system, there may be hope 
for a changed order; there certainly can be 
none in blind struggling. Indeed, of all 
things to be averted, revolution is the most 
important. Until there has been reached a 
[ 123 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

general understanding of the nature of our 
economic system, no revolution could suc- 
ceed, even if it were successful in overthrow- 
ing a government. Those who inspire and 
conduct it have not thought out the better 
order they wish to set up, and thus the waste 
of life and treasure would be wholly in vain. 
In education and an understanding of eco- 
nomics lies the only hope for averting the 
dissasters that now loom ahead like spectres 
of a past that will not die until a new order 
is born. 

The fact that the controlling class does 
realize that something is vitally wrong is 
evidenced, here and there, by all sorts of 
schemes put forward for changing the sys- 
tem. For instance, certain economists pro- 
pose that the gold standard should be super- 
seded by a standard based on the value of 
commodities. It is not easy to see how this 
could be done in a simple manner, but even 
though it could, would it help to put an end 
to pyramiding? Does not the difficulty be- 
gin with the struggle of the Non-producers 
to take their toll from the Producers? Every 
increase in the cost of living affects the Non- 
producer as much as it does the Producer. 
The Non-producer, who derives his income 
from land rents or no matter what source, 

[ 124 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

let us say, is accustomed to a certain scale of 
life. On the whole, he or she probably lives 
very much above the average. If prices of 
food and clothing go up, the Non-producer 
must increase his income, or else make a cut 
in his living expenses. Naturally he prefers 
the former course, and since he is in a posi- 
tion where he can take action, he does so, and 
if his income is from land, he merely raises 
the rental charge on the property he owns. 
Beside that, the number of Non-producers is 
increasing proportionately faster than the 
Producers, so that there is a greater and 
greater burden continually piling up on the 
back of the producer. Again comes the Na- 
tional Government, the State, the Coimty, 
the Town. The cost of all things goes up 
for them as well. Result, higher taxation, 
and the debt limit reached in many cities 
and towns. Likewise a shortage of school- 
buildings, street improvements, and all the 
factors that go to make up the necessities 
and amenities of community life. Demand 
for more hospitals, jails, sar^itaria, and other 
buildings in which to take care of the human 
by-products that are crushed under the pyra- 
mid. It is all a mad whirl, without rhyme or 
reason. Communities give away their land 
increments to private individuals, who, in 
[ 125 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

their turn lend the money so obtained back 
to the community, at interest, in order to 
make improvements which again raise the 
site value of adjoining land. Thus im- 
provements paid for with borrowed money 
are paid for twice over, very frequently, 
since both the capital and the interest charge 
have to be paid by the community, which is 
continuously hanging a heavier capitaliza- 
tion around its neck. The vicious circle has 
but one possible issue and that is the extinc- 
tion of the Non-producing private land- 
owner, and the complete death of the tra- 
dition that a chosen few shall possess the 
unassailable right to collect an increasing 
annual rental from human beings for the 
right to occupy the surface of the earth. It 
is not a question of class against class, for 
it makes no difference who possesses the 
right. It is a question of applied economics 
and should be studied without prejudice. 

Under the stress of the disasters caused by 
the unregulated use of land and unrestricted 
land speculation. City-planning, or Town- 
planning as it is often called, has appeared 
in the United States. How many cities 
have passed through the dream of making 
their community over, of bringing order out 
of chaos, of correcting the hideous mistakes 
[ 126 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

that have been permitted through the un- 
trammelled private use of land! Through- 
out the country there is a keen searching for 
some method of undoing the past, and yet 
how many city plans are today languishing 
in the archives of the city hall ! How many 
professional city planners have collected 
large sums for advice which was worthless, 
because the plan could never be carried out 
under the present system of land tenure and 
control? No city planning scheme is worth 
the paper on which it is drawn, unless it can 
be accompanied by a plan for land-control. 
If it could be carried out, under some ex- 
ceptionally favorable conditions without 
land control, it would only add a huge prob- 
lem in taxation to the town that carried it 
out. If the use value of the land improved 
by a city plan is allowed to be appropriated 
by individuals, then the city that permits 
such an appropriation is merely trying to 
lift itself out of debt by its boot- straps. The 
ever increasing demand for improvements 
and the cost of maintenance cannot be met 
except by a tax levy that would be rejected 
by every person in the community. Cities 
cannot tax themselves much beyond the aver- 
age that obtains, for there is competition in 
taxation as in everything else. Too high 
[ 127 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

taxes will drive away certain wealthy tax- 
payers. 

Thus the principle of discounting taxes is 
adopted and money is borrowed. No more 
vicious system could possibly be devised than 
this plan of continually eating out of the 
pantry of the future. It is all a part of the 
pyramiding method that has our commerce 
and industry so firmly in its grip that we 
cannot escape wars and more wars, in our 
blind and vain struggle to perpetuate a sys- 
tem that cannot stand without a steady trib- 
ute to Death, whether on the fields of war, 
or in the fields of industry itself. Does any- 
one now pretend that industrial and commer- 
cial competition are not in themselves war, 
as well as the seeds of the armed war that 
follows? 

The experiences of the Garden City move- 
ment in England, and with the so-called Co- 
partnership Tenants, indicates beyond dis- 
pute that the only method of relief in the 
contest of wages versus house rentals, is the 
system whereby the use value of land reverts 
to the benefit of those who live and work 
on it. There are no Non-producers in these 
communities, except those who lend the orig- 
inal capital necessary to start the undertak- 
ing. But it is lent at a low rate of interest, 
[ 128 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

and when it has been repaid, the properties 
belong to those who Hve in the community. 
Thus as the town grows, and more people 
come there, and as more industries or more 
shops and stores find it profitable to locate 
there, the use value of the land for those in- 
dustries and businesses rises, and yields a 
profit to the community. Theoretically, the 
community might keep the use value of the 
land down, and take its profit in a lower cost 
of food and clothing, for example, but this 
would hardly be practical until the number 
of these communities had risen to a point 
where the system of cooperative ownership 
was comparatively general throughout the 
nation. 

But such a condition is of course still a 
long way off, although Australia and New 
Zealand have initiated land reforms of a far- 
reaching nature. Germany, through land 
purchase by her towns and through zoning 
laws, had advanced to a considerable degree 
in an intelligent effort directed at the 
extinguishment of non-producing land- 
holders. Even New York City, as referred 
to in the preceding chapter, had made a des- 
ultory movement toward putting an end to 
certain forms of destructive speculation, for 
she had adopted the system of zoning or re- 
[ 129 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

stricting the use and occupancy of land 
within her limits. Slowly and very pain- 
fully it seems as though some realization of 
the actual nature of the disease was becom- 
ing more and more manifest, although those 
who endeavor to point it out are generally 
accused of belonging to that particularly 
despised class who advocate the abolition of 
private property. As a matter of fact, land 
is not private property. It belongs to the 
nation and a deed of conveyance is in reality 
nothing but a franchise to hold. This point 
was made clear in the testimony taken before 
the Coal Commission of England, at the ses- 
sion of May 6th, 1919, when learned legal 
authorities such as Coke and Blackstone 
were cited to the effect that land in England 
belongs to the Crown and is held by indi- 
viduals merely as tenement. Thus any meas- 
ure designed to prevent the private appro- 
priation of revenues from land in payment 
for the privilege to use it, is not in any sense 
an act directed at the abolition of private 
property. It is only an effort to put an end 
to a system that cannot continue without in- 
volving civilization in a series of disasters, 
the end of which few intelligent men like to 
think about. If this point could be made 
clear, and if the non-producing class could 
[ 130 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

be deprived of their claim that "Private 
property is being attacked!" which they al- 
ways use as a cry with which to fight every 
attempt to secure a better and fairer and 
more economic system of land use and ten- 
ure, it might be possible in the United States 
to initiate a movement toward putting an 
end to the intolerable system under which 
we at present struggle. 

But stating the problem is one thing and 
offering a remedy is another. How is it pos- 
sible to change a system which touches so 
many people, which is looked upon as good 
and honorable, around which our whole tra- 
dition of law is built, and the changing of 
which appears to demand the sacrifice of a 
principle that is looked upon as the one fixed 
thing on earth? Those who understand it 
and wish to make others understand, and 
who know that a true and just prosperity is 
not possible until the system is changed ; who 
also believe that there is no way out of mili- 
tarism and navalism and their recurring par- 
oxysms of death and destruction, may well 
confess to a feeling of hopelessness as they 
stand before a problem so difficult, so com- 
plex, so devoid of any point of attack that 
attack seems hopeless. Men and women are 
willing to talk housing, to write about hous- 

[ 131 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

ing, to advocate better housing, and yet 
when the fundamental difficulty is pointed 
out and the part played by land is revealed, 
there comes a hopeless sigh. And yet the 
signs are multiplying that points of attack 
may be discovered. The acute period is at 
hand, for the cost of our mistakes has piled 
up into such a monumental sum, that we 
shall be driven to study the process by which 
we have permitted it. Sheer economic wis- 
dom will some day point the way to the 
many as it now does to the few, and then we 
shall begin gradually to make a basic change 
in our system. The housing problem may 
well prove to be the point of attack, for it 
vitally concerns one of the two indispensable 
necessities of life. 

In respect to the subject of planning, to 
which it is time to return, it should also be 
pointed out that city planning is only a bite 
at the cherry. The movement for planning 
on a larger scale is taking shape in England, 
in Belgium, and even in far-off New Zea- 
land. It has been perceived that the coun- 
try needs planning just as much as does the 
city, and that it is useless to plan a certain 
territory or area such as a city, or a rapidly 
growing town, unless there are correspond- 
ing plans for merging that territory with 
[ 132 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

the surrounding areas when it becomes nec- 
essary in the future. 

The whole problem of community plan- 
ning is involved not alone in the location of 
houses, streets, markets, schools, churches, 
shops, and the general accessories, but also 
embraces industry in all forms, transporta- 
tion, and agriculture. It is a problem of 
keeping an economical balance, and of mak- 
ing a community that is not unwieldy and 
top-heavy. It is of no advantage to the city, 
the state, or the nation, to have cities and 
towns grow to a point where they are not 
only physically inefficient, but where the 
scale of life is, for the great army of workers, 
a descending rather than an ascending one. 
City-growth is today a source of great profit 
to a certain class of land owners, speculators, 
and merchants. City-growth ought to be a 
source of continuing wealth to the city it- 
self, and not a more and more perplexing 
problem of trying to find money with which 
to maintain it as a physical machine, and per- 
haps improve it as a center of intellectual 
activity. 

In this connection, it is worth while to 

quote the following from the address to the 

recent New Zealand Housing and Town 

Planning Conference of the Hon. G. W. 

[ 133 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs for 
New Zealand: 

''The wily land speculator, in selling 
farms and suburban areas for residential 
purposes, has taken little or no account of 
whether his sales and resultant profits fitted 
in with either the lay-out of the city or the 
adaptability of the lands he sold to drainage 
or water-supply. Such questions did not 
trouble him. His primary object has been 
to secure the enormous increase in value that 
has been obtainable through the necessity of 
workmen residing as closely as possible to 
their employment. 

''It is time that a stop was put to this by 
legislation being passed which will make it 
impossible for any person to sell residential 
areas unless provision is made for the prop- 
erties fitting into a clearly defined scheme 
of roading, drainage, water-supply, lighting 
for the future, even though their necessity 
at the present may not be so apparent. 
Coupled with the public utilities I have men- 
tioned is one other — namely, that from 
every block of land which is sold for resi- 
dential purposes there should be set aside by 
the owner as a gift to the people necessary 
reserves for public utilities, such as schools, 
post-offices, parks, recreation-grounds, and 

[ 134 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

open spaces. The property-owner who is 
going to draw large profits from the com- 
munity must, in my opinion, be made respon- 
sible for the needs of that community in the 
matters to which I have referred. This is a 
most important phase of the whole subject, 
for the reason that the village of today in 
ten years hence is the township, in twenty 
years after it has possibly become a town dis- 
trict or borough, and fifty years later may 
be the prosperous miniature city. On us of 
this generation rests the obligation of seeing 
that those who come after us are provided 
by proper town-planning schemes with those 
things which make for healthy environment, 
recreation areas, and the absence of slums. 
How these things may be best secured by 
legislation and the creation of a healthy pub- 
lic opinion is the business of this Conference 
to consider. 

"One of the greatest problems of the pres- 
ent day — and it has been tremendously ac- 
centuated by the war — is that of providing 
for the housing of the people. The increase 
in land-values caused by the growth of the 
cities is one of the primary causes of high 
rent. Next in importance comes the in- 
crease in the cost of building-material of all 
kinds, more particularly timber, plus the 
[ 135 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

increase of the cost of labor caused by the 
higher standard of living of today as com- 
pared with past years. 

"Two attempts have been made to supply 
the want of homes in New Zealand. Under 
the State Advances Act down to the 31st of 
March, 1918, £3,473,000 had been advanced 
to workers to enable them to purchase or 
erect their homes, the total number of loans 
outstanding on that date being 9,511. Also, 
648 workers' dwellings had been erected by 
the State under the Workers' Dwellings 
Act, 1905, and its amendments. The power 
given to Municipal Corporations to erect 
workers' homes has not been availed of. I 
am satisfied that this country must embark 
upon a great scheme for housing the people, 
and that we must ''talk in millions" on this 
subject if we are to have a happy and a con- 
tented people. Revolution and anarchy are 
not bred in the houses of men who have 
happy homes and delightful gardens. Its 
spawn comes from the crowded tenement, 
the squalid environment, and the slum." 

Also we may note the following state- 
ments from the circular issued by the Ca- 
nadian Government in explanation of the 
terms under which loans are to be granted 
for housing: 

[ 136 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

"'The success of the housing movement de- 
pends upon the acquirement of suitable land 
at its fair value, and at a cost which working 
men can afford to pay. It is essential, there- 
fore, that statutory provision shall be made 
by the provinces for a cheap and speedy 
method of compulsory taking of the land re- 
quired for housing purposes. To facilitate 
proper planning and to secure economy in 
connection with housing schemes, compara- 
tively large sites should, as a rule, be chosen 
so as to permit of comprehensive treatment. 
Such sites should be conveniently accessible 
to places of employment, means of transpor- 
tation, water supply, sewers, and other pub- 
lic utilities. 

"'Where housing schemes are proposed, 
the sites as well as the buildings, should be 
properly planned so as to secure sanitary 
conditions, wholesale environment, and the 
utmost economy. The land should be sold 
under building restrictions that will insure 
its use for residential purposes only, and 
should it thereafter be desired to utilize any 
of the lots so sold for stores or other busi- 
ness purposes, the increased value for such 
business sites should be made available for 
public purposes in connection with such 
scheme." 

[ 137 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

In both of these recommendations by the 
Canadian Government, the prime factors in 
the solution of the housing problem are 
clearly and fearlessly stated ; and so far as I 
know, no government has hitherto officially 
acquainted its citizens with these facts. You 
must have cheap land to begin with and you 
must keep the land cheap to end with, as far 
as houses are concerned. The Canadian 
government bases its recommendations on 
the theory that land is to be bought and 
owned individually; but it points out that the 
increased value in business sites due to the 
building of houses should be made available 
for public purposes and should not go into 
the pockets of the fortunate possessors 
of the land required for those building 
sites. 

And again, these remarkable words from 
the recent report of the Ontario Housing 
Commission: 

''Houses cannot be built in the air. We 
must have access to land, and, broadly speak- 
ing, the land question is the root of not only 
housing problems, but of all social problems 
both in rural and urban territory. 

"There is a certain amount of land around 
almost every town and city in Ontario ripe 
for development. Eor example there is a 
[ 138 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

huge tract of vacant land lying between St. 
Clair and Eglinton Avenues, west of Bath- 
urst Street, Toronto, all owned by one syn- 
dicate, capable of accommodating a large 
number of people under the most favorable 
conditions. Instances of such kind, varying 
in degree, can be found on the outskirts of 
many of our towns. 

''During boom times land is subdivided 
for building purposes for a radius of from 
three to ten miles outside city boundaries. 
Take for example the cities of Ottawa and 
Hull with 123,000 inhabitants. The Com- 
mission of Conservation has studied these 
two cities, and from its report the following 
particulars are taken. The present cities 
would occupy five square miles if the den- 
sity were forty people to the acre. It is 
estimated that the population of these cities 
will increase to 350,000 in fifty years, and a 
total area of fifteen square miles will pro- 
vide for this ultimate population with a den- 
sity of forty people to the acre. But the 
subdivided area consists of sixty-five square 
miles of territory only a small part of which 
is likely to be required for building in a grad- 
ual way after fifty years. Of this sixty-five 
square miles, 41,600 acres is lying idle and 
uncultivated because it is subdivided into 
[ 139 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

small lots, and held by absentee owners in 
the hope of securing speculative profits 
which are not likely to be realized, and which 
the owners have done nothing to earn. This 
land contributes nothing to the public good 
and little to the public revenue. 

''So long as we allow the individual to ap- 
propriate the community created incre- 
ment, generally not even taxing him on it, 
we give him that with which he increases 
rent. He has capitalized that which the 
people produced and should have. This is 
the greatest single factor in the housing 
problem and to really solve the one we must 
solve the other. By the combined system of 
the assessors of letting off easily the holders 
of idle land, and taxing heavily the owners 
of improved land, covering as well, all the 
improvements, the holding of idle land is 
encouraged, and the building of homes, fac- 
tories, and mercantile establishments is dis- 
couraged. Holding land out of use for a 
speculative increase is not the way to hous- 
ing reform. Land is fixed in amount — un- 
like automobiles, baby carriages and other 
articles. If a spectator holds it, no one may 
make more land to satisfy the demand. 
When the profits of land speculation are 
taken by the state for public purposes land 
[ 140 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

speculation will become an unpopular occu- 
pation, 

"Let us once establish the principle of 
taxing the land on its economic value, that is 
its value for use, and correspondingly de- 
crease the taxes on improvements and there 
will be such a competition on the part of land 
for use that our entire situation will be 
changed. 

"A tax on speculative profits and the un- 
earned increment levied at the time prop- 
erty is transferred would act as a deterrent 
to speculation, and return to the community 
a large part of the socially created values. 
When we wish to obtain the value of land it 
is customary to appeal to real estate opera- 
tors, but they are unreliable valuers from a 
community point of view, and their experi- 
ence is injurious rather than helpful to 
sound judgment. 

"In the case of those new and charming 
towns which the English Government has 
built to house munition workers, the un- 
earned increment has been carefully elimi- 
nated. The land is taken at a pre-war valua- 
tion and the right is reserved of taking more 
land adjacent thereto at the same specula- 
tor-defying terms. 

"The economic use of land in the rural 

[ 141 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

parts of the Province, and the prevention 
of the unhealthy use of land in crowded cities 
are two of our most urgent problems. The 
various governments as owners and devel- 
opers of land should eliminate from their 
policies all that tends to promote specula- 
tion. It is said that 'some of the worst ex- 
amples of speculation in Canada have been 
initiated by governments and largely sup- 
ported by governments. The present meth- 
ods of land transfer and settlement still give 
every encouragement to speculation.' 

"This subject has received attention from 
previous commissions. The Commission ap- 
pointed by the Ontario Government to re- 
port on unemployment made the following 
statement: 'The question of a change in the 
present method of taxing land, especially 
vacant land, is, in the opinion of your com- 
missioners, deserving of consideration. It 
is evident that speculation in land and the 
withholding from use and monopolizing of 
land suitable for housing and gardening, in- 
volve conditions alike detrimental to the 
community and to persons of small means. 
Further, land values are peculiarly the re- 
sult of growth of population and public 
expenditure, while social problems greatly 
increase as population centralizes, and the 
[ 142 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

relief of urban poverty calls for large expen- 
ditures from public and private sources. It 
appears both just and desirable that values 
resulting from the growth of communities 
should be available for community responsi- 
bilities. Wisely followed, such a policy in- 
volves no injustice to owners of land for 
legitimate purposes; and the benefits which 
would follow the ownership and greater use 
of land by wage-earners justify the adoption 
of measures necessary to secure these objects 
as quickly as possible.' 

"Much of the success of the garden cities 
and suburbs, later proposed, will depend 
upon the conditions under which land can be 
secured and it is urgently necessary to our 
future progress that the land question should 
at once receive the most careful attention of 
our legislators." 

All of these indicate a governmental rec- 
ognition of the necessity of reversing the 
present principle by taking part of the con- 
trol of land and the profits from land use 
out of the hands of private individuals. It 
is a first step, and when followed to the end, 
as it must be some day, the housing prob- 
lem in urban districts would be no more. 
The same principle of land control adopted 
by the nation at large would free the land to 
[ 143 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

occupancy and use at a fair rental; cost of 
production would be diminished; the pur- 
chasing power of money would be increased, 
and gradually brought to as nearly a stable 
condition as the relations of one country with 
the rest of the world would permit. 

Until this is done, there is no solution of 
the housing problem nor is there an end to 
the present industrial chaos, and no possible 
security against wars which will continue to 
drain one nation after another, not only of 
their wealth, but of the best of their life- 
blood. 

It is true that the increasing price charged 
for the use of land on which to build is not 
the only factor in the race between wages 
and living costs. Distribution, although it 
is not an actual process of production, is a 
most necessary adjunct thereto. This is so 
badly organized that it adds materially to 
the cost of the things distributed, and under 
our theory that men are entitled to engage 
in the business of distributing almost with- 
out restraint the problem is not one easily 
dealt with. 

It is not alone a question of the economical 

handling of things, for there is also the added 

factor of competition. Let us suppose that 

a town has four grocers, each doing a good 

[ 144 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

business, and providing all the service 
needed by the community. But a fifth 
makes his appearance, which means that, as 
there can be no appreciable increase in con- 
sumption of groceries simply because an- 
other grocer has opened a store, there must 
be a division of business between five instead 
of between four. The profits that formerly 
went to provide a living for four must now 
provide a living for five. What happens? 
There must be a raising of prices in order to 
keep the five grocers from losing their busi- 
ness. Now if the same thing happens in 
other lines of trade, and it does, the result is 
that after a while there is a decided increase 
in the cost of living. The need for more 
sites for shops sends up the rental of prop- 
erty, and the community finds that its cost 
of doing business has increased, while it has 
gained absolutely nothing, as a community. 
No one is better off in the end, except the 
very few who make a good quick profit out 
of land sold at the moment of keenest com- 
petition. He will be considered the smart, 
or the lucky man, because all the other land- 
owners would have liked to take a profit, 
also. Therefore there is no community con- 
sciousness of what the proceeding actually 
means, and no perception of the fact that the 
[ 145 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

smart or lucky seller of land at a high price 
has merely added a capital charge to the 
town, the interest on which must be paid 
perpetually by those who live and work 
there. Yet, as has already been pointed out, 
the theory of sanctity and propriety that 
surrounds and hallows this form of money 
making through non-production, is deeply 
rooted in our economic system and in our 
individual conception of good and honorable 
business. 

What will change it? There are only two 
forces. First, a thorough education in true 
economics as the foundation on which busi- 
ness and industry alone can rest, and second, 
the force of a blind revolution, conscious of 
our intolerable condition, and seeing vaguely 
that the higher wage is an illusion, yet 
unconscious of the real nature of the strug- 
gle that seems so hopeless. But the power 
of this second force is very doubtful. 

The French Revolution was the result of 
a land system that enslaved the peasantry 
and crushed it with taxation and tithes. The 
Russian Revolution was due to the same 
cause, and all Europe is today a seething 
ferment because of the economic chaos into 
which it has been plunged. Yet it is idle to 
imagine that revolutions have greatly 
[ 146 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

changed conditions. It is a common illusion 
that out of revolutions have grown great so- 
cial and economic benefits; but the world 
today is a complete refutation of this theory. 
Revolutions have merely supplanted one po- 
litical form with another. Only the modern 
Russian experiment has sought valiantly to 
change the form of land tenure or the form 
of industry, which, by the sheer necessity of 
their demands, dominate and control other 
governments. The effect of our Revo- 
lution against England was to set up 
a new form of government and under that 
form of government we adopted the English 
system of land tenure and use and later on 
we borrowed completely its whole industrial 
system. As a result, we are in the selfsame 
predicament. Those who revolted had no 
program for the development of the United 
States so far as land use and tenure was con- 
cerned and later on there was no program 
for the development of industry. Every- 
thing was left to the unbiased license of the 
individual. Today when men openly discuss 
the possibilities of a revolution, only a few 
seem to realize that nothing but a miraculous 
intelligence out of which a new economic 
system shall be born can avert the impending 
debacle. Men have reached the breaking 
[ 147 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

point all over the world, and the tragedy 
is that they do not realize the futility of the 
measures they propose as remedies. 

Never were leaders so badly needed as 
now. We want — we must have — an eco- 
nomic system based upon justice and fair 
play to all. It is the task of the nation to 
provide such a system. To do this, there 
must be profound sincerity. The task can- 
not be approached over the old path. It 
can only be approached by hewing a new 
road, by cutting boldly through the forest 
of platitudes with which we have so long 
solaced ourselves, and by building a road 
that will carry both the employer and the 
employee in peace and not in discord. 

Such a road must provide for a higher 
actual wage to the worker. Not merely a 
wage that looks higher, because it is larger, 
but one that will actually buy more things 
and yield a larger measure of pleasure and 
content. To study the housing problem 
without envisaging the real problem is like 
trying to discover rivers in the moon with 
the naked eye. 

And the problem is not merely an inter- 
esting study in economic or social phenom- 
ena. It is a question of the life or death of 
nations, of the survival or extinction of what 
[ 148 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

we know as civilization. We are so proud 
and so forgetful that we cannot conceive of 
the passing away of all the life that sur- 
rounds us, and the destruction and decay of 
all the stupendous structures we have 
achieved. But let us look backward for a 
moment and think upon the civilizations 
that once were, and that are no longer. 
There are forces in the world based upon 
nothing but the law of human life, and yet 
they are so strong that nothing can resist 
them. When men are spiritually starved, 
the end is visible, for man cannot and will 
not live in spiritual starvation. 

In this connection we might also pause to 
ask whether it is not possible that we can 
over-emphasize the importance of the houses 
in which men are to live. In the past, we 
have most assuredly under-emphasized their 
importance, so far as the majority of people 
are concerned, but it is easily conceivable 
that in a state of real progress leading to a 
higher intellectual and cultural state the 
house would lose its importance, while other 
buildings would gain. 

If we are to achieve a larger measure 

of freedom from manual labor then we 

should likewise be set free to enjoy a larger 

measure of mental recreation or application. 

[ 149 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

The house, continually improved and per- 
fected as an economic appliance, wherein we 
might satisfy our physical needs with the 
least amount of labor, where cooperation in 
many services would make the task of the 
housekeeper much lighter, would for ex- 
ample, leave the mother free to resume many 
of those educational duties in the life of her 
children — duties which have been thrust in 
an ever increasing measure on the schools, 
with the result that many a child is today 
more inspired by a teacher, as it has the 
good fortune to come into contact with such 
a one, than it is by its own mother. It is 
idle to attempt to measure the value in giv- 
ing such an increased measure of lessons to 
the mother through a corresponding release 
from many household duties that are now 
made necessary by our ill-planned and ill- 
adapted houses, and our continual repeti- 
tion and duplication of work and service that 
could be infinitely better done if organized 
along lines of training and skill. By such 
a method, and in many ways, we could raise 
the performance of domestic service to a task 
of dignity and to a level where it would not 
carry the stigma of a despised social infe- 
riority. 

It is toward such a perfection of the house 
[ 150 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

that we must strive, and if we do, shall we 
not also see that in that process of emancipa- 
tion we are to find the house growing less im- 
portant as a piece of machinery, while other 
structures become more important? Private 
life ought to grow more simple and public 
life more dignified and noble. We ennoble 
above all things the soldier in his misery of 
mud and cold, courageously enduring all 
things in the essence of absolute unselfish de- 
votion. Why can we not ennoble the same 
man when he comes home from work in a 
coal mine? 

The answer lies in the fact that in the first 
case we ourselves have become devoted to a 
national ideal, while in the second case, we 
have lost that ideal and replaced it with a 
commonplace conviction that the world is 
ruled by the law of profit and that idealism 
may be all right to talk about but has no 
place in business. We descend from an 
overwrought state in which a mixture of 
emotion and real humanity have fluxed to 
produce a self-abandonment that goes to the 
extreme where life is given heroically and 
without complaint, to a state where life 
in the abstract has no vital appeal. During 
our overwrought condition we subscribe to 
resolutions over and over again, by which 

[ 151 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

we think that we have bound ourselves to 
change the old conditions. Yet when we are 
confronted with the problem, the very diffi- 
culty of finding a way soon kills our high 
resolve, the task seems so hopeless in the 
face of the system in which we are caught. 

Undoubtedly there is a sincere wish on 
the part of a great many people for better 
houses for the low-priced workers of the 
United States. But the discovery has been 
made by those who have seriously tried to 
find some way of realizing their wish, that 
it is economically impossible. The same dis- 
covery, in regard to the payment of a higher 
actual wage, has not been made, and yet 
there are also a great number of people who 
believe that such a higher wage should be 
paid. Undoubtedly many also believe that 
by reason of the fact that wages are today 
in dollars and cents higher than ever before, 
the recipient is actually receiving a wage 
that will enable him to buy more than ever 
before, while this is not true, except in by 
far the minority of cases. But what is also 
true, as has already been stated, is that there 
is no possible way of paying all workers an 
actually higher wage — one that will ac- 
tually buy more things. The non-producers, 
largely in the shape of land-owners, appro- 
[ 152 ] 



PROBLEM OF LAND CONTROL 

priate the added amount handed to the 
wage-earner, by demanding more and more 
for the use of land. 

We even boast in our pride that land val- 
ues in the United States are going up — 
which means, under our system of giving 
these values to individuals, that the cost of 
operating our national plant, whether it be 
manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, 
or housing, is going up. Those who produce 
must pay an interest charge on that higher 
land value, and little by little, the landlords 
grow more powerful and the tenants more 
helpless. If we shifted the position it would 
be no different. The present tenants would 
make no better landlords, although the pres- 
ent landlords might make better tenants. 

We must find a way to control the use and 
occupancy of land and make its added use 
value become a source of benefit to all, rather 
than a present curse to the majority and a 
portentous menace to the country as a whole. 

Without land control, there is no way out 
of a situation that, bad as it may be in old 
Europe, is even now causing many misgiv- 
ings and much apprehension to those who 
have believed so strongly in the great des- 
tiny of the New America. Most people are 
quite unwilling to believe these things or 
[ 153 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

even to permit them to be discussed, pub- 
licly or privately, but there are a few coura- 
geous Americans left. They realize that we 
are in truth at the parting of the ways, and 
that our destiny is now utterly dependent 
upon the way that shall be chosen. 
Which one? 



[ 154 ] 



VIII 
WHAT TO DO 

IN the midst of the present ferment, when 
so great a proportion of people are un- 
willing to search fearlessly and honestly 
for a way out, who can offer a program such 
as will command attention? Who can divert 
the press from its stupid pursuit of phantoms, 
from its preposterous witch hunting, from 
its perversion of facts and its suppression of 
all loyalty and patriotism, when those quali- 
ties are not based upon its own senseless 
conception of what citizenship means? No 
greater menace confronts the nation than 
this utter prostitution of news-gathering to 
falsehood and misrepresentation. Fortu- 
nately, the wide distrust which these methods 
have engendered gives hope that truth and 
reason are not forever to be engulfed in 
the ignoble sea of newspaper ink, but that 
they may rise again through the sheer in- 
herent common sense of our people. 

But in the meantime, what to do? Who 
[ 155 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

has developed a philosophy of industry such 
as may be offered without inviting such ridi- 
cule or persecution as completely to dis- 
credit the program it embodies? For my- 
self, I am convinced that we must restudy 
the whole industrial system, without fear 
and without prejudice, and that it will be 
utterly useless to attempt any effort toward 
better housing until we have gone to the very 
bottom of the morass in which we now 
flounder. 

From the point of view of communal life, 
Letchworth, the first garden city of Eng- 
land, still stands as the one real example 
of community building in which there has 
been an intelligent appreciation of all the 
factors that go to make the life of a nation. 
And as it is with community building that 
the problem seems to begin, we must re- 
study not so much Letchworth but the prin- 
ciples which controlled its origin and de- 
velopment. These are very simple. They 
rest upon the concept of man as a social 
being, requiring work under conditions that 
inspire him to give of his best, enabling him 
to found and maintain a decent home, and 
to enjoy a rest such as will repair his body 
and satisfy his spiritual and recreational 
needs. But this concept of man does not 
[ 156 ] 



WHAT TO DO 

begin with man in a city. It begins with 
man everywhere, and means that all men 
are entitled to these things. Today we herd 
millions of people in industrial centers where 
both work and rest are impossible, except 
under the feverish lash that drives urban 
life at higher and higher speed. We crowd 
them into mammoth buildings by day, and 
into other vast buildings by night. To 
accommodate their multitudinous coming 
and going we burrow under our streets and 
under our rivers, shutting them into trains 
like cattle going to an abattoir. On the sur- 
face of the earth it is hardly better. Con- 
gestion rages everywhere. In the streets, 
where traffic daily becomes more difficult and 
dangerous; in the tram-cars, where all is 
jostle and push (and here we note the fact 
that in spite of an immense increase in 
traffic, our whole electric railway system con- 
fesses itself bankrupt, demanding as the 
price of its preservation an increase in fares 
such as must again be reflected in further 
higher expense to the workers, and a conse- 
quent further higher cost to the consumers 
— a phenomenon directly attributable to the 
result of allowing individuals to appropriate 
the land values produced by improvements 
in transportation, and thereby to levy a 
[ 157 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

private tax on all those who are compelled 
to use the land) ; wherever we turn, in our 
crowded cities, we meet life in restless floods. 
Even the places of amusement are con- 
gested, for alas I all amusement has now been 
commercialized, forcing men, women and 
children to rely entirely upon sources out- 
side of themselves when they seek escape 
from the fever of the city and its mental drain. 
Even our schools are wofully inadequate, 
both as to buildings and educational facili- 
ties. Ever faster and faster grow the 
needs; ever faster and faster do they be- 
come impossible and unrealizable, and yet 
we pursue the illusion as though we were 
straining like thirsty men after the mirage 
that rests forever at the desert's edge. Land 
values rise — life values fall. The moun- 
tain of debt piles itself up everywhere. Our 
cities no longer know which way to turn 
for money with which to meet the growing 
needs of their expanding congestion. Prob- 
lems multiply faster than the mind of the 
citizen can comprehend them, and he must 
fight his way through the tissue of political 
fraud and office-seeking promises, ere he 
can hope to gain a glimmer of the truth. 

In brief, such is the picture of the modern 
city. By contrast, what has happened to 
[ 158 ] 



WHAT TO DO 

the country? Landlordism has crept across 
the land hke a pest. With landlordism goes 
soil depreciation, a declining land productiv- 
ity, a degenerate race of tenant farmers, 
an abandonment of the countryside by the 
younger generations, a dreary monotony 
for those who are forced to stay. They are 
largely condemned to isolation, in spite of 
the telephone, the automobile, and the rural 
free delivery — those elements of country 
life which are commonly thought to have 
made the countryside a social paradise — 
and thus every boy and girl seeks to escape 
to a community where social contacts are 
possible. Our problem then is the nation 
as a whole, and not a part of it. The prin- 
ciple on which Letchworth was founded 
takes cognizance of the nation, although it 
is expressed in a community which has today 
attained a population of some twelve thou- 
sand. The principle is this: Industry and 
agriculture must balance each other. Once 
they did, even in the United States, where 
the small New England towns gradually 
developed small industries such as gave the 
commimity a reason for its existence. A 
balanced condition, such as this, means that 
those who depend upon centralized industry 
for their livelihood have free access to the 
[ 159 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

soil, and also to a community life ; that those 
who till the soil on an extensive basis, 
whether in dairying or truck-farming, shall 
likewise have access to a community — 
that they shall, in fact, belong to and be a 
part of a community such as will afford them 
and their wives and children full opportuni- 
ties for their mental and spiritual develop- 
ment. If you add to this the principle of 
communal ownership of land, under which 
system all additions to land values revert to 
the community and constitute a source of 
revenue, then you have a picture of the 
Letchworth idea. It seems an unanswer- 
able philosophy, and it is encouraging to 
know that a second Letchworth is now in 
process of creation, also in England. 

The principle involved is the direct antith- 
esis of our present helter-skelter method 
of everybody-f or-himself and the devil-take- 
the-hindmost. It does not involve the sup- 
pression of individuality or the enslavement 
of anybody to a pedantic, monotonous, or 
tasteless ideal, in which life has been re- 
duced to a regime. It substitutes for un- 
bridled individualism, licensed to take ad- 
vantage of humanity wherever and when- 
ever it may, a cooperative basis of produc- 
tion in which workers of all kinds may find 
[ 160 ] 



WHAT TO DO 

themselves set spiritually free to do their 
best. Instead of spurring men on to dis- 
cover the future needs and necessities of 
mankind, in order that they may capture 
the means of satisfying them and thus make 
man pay to the uttermost limit, the principle 
of Letchworth, expanded to national aims, 
would mean that the satisfaction of man's 
needs and necessities should be the object 
of study in order that they might be satis- 
fied, and not in order that they might be 
made the means of levying the pirate's trib- 
ute. 

Letchworth also rests upon the economic 
concept that transportation is waste, unless 
compelled by exigencies beyond the control 
of man, such as soil and climate. The belt 
of agricultural land which surrounds the 
city produces much of the food required by 
the community. But this agricultural belt 
is to be maintained and not sacrificed 
to the belief that a larger community 
would be better. The land speculator is 
helpless to perpetrate his crimes in Letch- 
worth. The whole development of the city 
is in the control of its citizens, and it is 
hardly to be believed that they will bring 
the calamities of congestion down on their 
heads merely for the sake of benefiting a 

[ 161 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

few merchants or storekeepers. Perhaps 
nothing can be made completely proof 
against a momentary epoch of greed, but 
surely nothing could be a greater preventive 
of rash or hasty action than to have the citi- 
zens of a city given the absolute power to 
decide how the land within their limits should 
be used. 

By material ends alone man will not 
achieve freedom. But to those who are 
persuaded that emancipation must come 
through a spiritual process, quite dissociated 
from any question of economics, or to those 
who believe that man must move forward 
economically, in order to gain spiritual free- 
dom, I offer the program published by the 
Cities Committee of the Sociological So- 
ciety, London. It is as follows : 

''Our faith is in moral Renewal, next in 
Re-education, and therewith Reconstruction. 
For fulfilment there must be a Resorption 
of Government into the body of the com- 
munity. How? By cultivating the habit 
of direct action instead of waiting upon rep- 
resentative agencies. Hence these social 
imperatives : 

''1. Cease to feel Labour personally as a 
burden, or see it socially as a problem ; prac- 
tise it as a primary function of life. 
[ 162 ] 



WHAT TO DO 

"2. Raise the life-standard of the people 
and the thought-standard of schools and 
universities; so may the workman and his 
family receive due meed of real wages ; the 
leisure of all become dignified; and for our 
money-economy be substituted a life-econ-^ 
omy. 

"3. Stimulate sympathetic imderstanding 
between all sections of the community by 
cooperation in local initiative; so may Eu- 
ropean statesmen be no longer driven to 
avoid revolution by making war. 

"4. Let cities, towns, villages, groups, asso- 
ciations, work out their own regional salva- 
tion ; for that they must have freedom, ideas, 
vision to plan, and means to carry out, (a) 
betterments of environment (such as hous- 
ing fit for family life and land for a renewed 
peasantry), (b) enlargements of mental 
horizon (such as forelooking imiversities 
quick with local life and interests) , (c) com- 
munitary festivals and other enrichments of 
life. All these must be parts of one ever- 
growing Design for the coming years to 
realize. 

"5. Make free use of the public credit 

for these social investments; but don't pay 

the tribute called market rate of interest; 

create the credit against the new social 

[ 163 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

assets, charge it with an insurance rate and 
a redemption rate, and pay the bankers 
a moderate commission to administer it 
through their system of interlocking banks 
and clearing houses ; the present unacknowl- 
edged use of the public credit by bankers 
must be recognized and regulated, and be- 
ing for private profit must be subordinated 
to the new communitary uses. 

"6. Fill the public purse from a steeply 
gradated income-tax (proceeds being shared 
by the local with the central authority) ; dis- 
criminate in favour of investments that im- 
prove the environment and develop the 
individual. Let the tax-gatherer take heavy 
toll of 'unearned increments,' such as the 
'bonus' to shareholders, the appreciation of 
speculative securities, the rise in land values 
from growth of population. 

''7. Eschew the despotic habit of regi- 
mentation, whether by governments, trusts, 
companies, tyrants, pedants or police; try 
the better and older way of coordination ex- 
panding from local centers through city, 
region, nation, and beyond ; so may the spirit 
of fellowship express itself, instead of being 
sterilized by fear, crushed by administrative 
machinery or perverted by repression. 

''8. Resist the political temptation to cen- 
[ 164 ] 



WHAT TO DO 

tralize all things in one metropolitan city; 
seek to renew the ancient tradition of federa- 
tion between free cities, regions, dominions. 

''9. Encourage the linkage of labour and 
professional associations across international 
frontiers; it is these that can quicken the 
unity of western civilization and bring forth 
its fruits of concord. Further, let our im- 
perial bureaucrats cease from their superior 
habit of instructing the orientals and try to 
learn from them. 

"10. In general, aim at making individ- 
uals more socialized and communities more 
individualized. To that end, let schools sub- 
ordinate books to outdoor observation and 
handicrafts ; let teachers draw the matter and 
the method of education from the life and 
tradition of their pupils' own region, as well 
as from the history and culture of mankind 
at large. Let universities seek first for syn- 
thesis in the civic life around them ; and only 
thereafter in the pages of philosophy. 
Above all let governing bodies learn, if not 
from the churches, at least from the psycho- 
logical and social sciences, the distinction 
between temporal and spiritual powers, and 
cease to play the double role of Pope and 
Csesar. As for the chemical and mechani- 
cal sciences let them repent of making hell- 
[ 165 ] 



THE JOKE ABOUT HOUSING 

upon-earth under war-lord and money-lord, 
and take service in the Kingdom of Heaven 
on earth. Then may the machine industry 
learn from artist-craftsman and town-plan- 
ner the social significance of Design in all 
human things, including the city itself ; that 
way lies the guild ideal and hope of its ex- 
pressing the civic spirit. Let civic designers 
give rustics access to the city as well as 
townsmen access to nature ; that way lies the 
regional ideal ; and some day men will enter 
through this portal into paradise regained. 

"Along these lines there is movement; 
but lacking in volume and unity. A cru- 
sade of direct action has long been afoot ; but 
with many halts and in sparse and isolated 
companies. The Spirit Creative is liberated 
and in flight; but too timidly and on dis- 
severed quests. It is time for clearer under- 
standing, closer cooperation, deeper unison 
between all men and women of good will and 
high endeavour. So may be prepared defi- 
nitely planned campaigns for the making 
and maintenance of worthy homes, smiling 
villages, noble cities. To engage the mili- 
tant energies of the race in these adventures 
of constructive peace and heroically to salve 
the perennial wreckages of humanity would 
be the moral equivalent of war." 
[ 166 ] 



WHAT TO DO 

Here is a program for Housing Reform, 
as it has so long been called, which is also 
a hmnan basis for Industry, a noble con- 
cept of Peace, a foundation upon which to 
erect a real system of Education, It ab- 
sorbs the housing problem into the whole 
social and economic body, informing it with 
the spirit of humanity and illuminating it 
with the light of a genuine democracy. 



[ 167 ] 



APPENDIX A 

From Canadian Correspondence to the 
Westminster Gazette, London, October 2, 
1919. 

''Acquaintance with the history and opera- 
tion of anti- Trust and anti- Combine legis- 
lation enacted at Ottawa in the last thirty- 
years affords no ground for expecting any 
general beneficent results from the Profi- 
teering Act passed by Parliament at West- 
minster, now going into service. In 1879 
the Dominion Parliament enacted a tariff 
the manifest purpose of which was to give 
statutory sanction and Government aid to 
profiteering by Canadian manufacturers. 
By its friends the Act was dubbed a national 
policy tariff. In it were embodied scores of 
penalty duties that were to be paid into the 
Dominion Treasury by men and women who 
bought other than wares made in Canada; 
and by so doing manifested a determination 
not to assist Canadian manufacturers in 
profiteering with the sanction of the law, and 
[ 169 ] 



APPENDIX A 

also with the alert, active, and continuous 
aid of the Customs Department at Ottawa. 

"Soon Trusts and Combines — with a cot- 
ton and sugar Trust easily in the lead — 
were organized to enable manufacturers to 
exact the last cent possible under the Tariff 
Act of 1879. There was a general outcry 
against Trusts and the rapacity that is al- 
ways characteristic of Trusts; and in 1889 
the Conservative Government that was re- 
sponsible for the Act sanctioning and aid- 
ing profiteering by manufacturers was 
forced to do something to allay popular dis- 
content due to the Trusts and the general 
and almost uniform use the Trusts had made 
of the power to exploit consumers bestowed 
on the Trusts by the first of the national 
policy tariffs. 

"An Anti-Trust Law was passed in 1889 
at the instance of the Conservative and 
avowedly Protectionist Government, of 
which Sir John A. Macdonald was Premier. 
It was without teeth! It was quite innocu- 
ous, and was never heard of after it had re- 
ceived the Royal Assent. 

"At the time of the change of Government 
in 1896, the popular outcry against Trusts 
and their exactions was as loud and as per- 
sistent as ever. The Liberals in opposition 
[ 170 ] 



APPENDIX A 

had had an effective part in the long-con- 
tinued agitation against Trusts. Accord- 
ingly, when, in 1897, they adopted and 
greatly extended the national policy system 
of the Conservative Governments, the Lib- 
erals embodied in their Protectionist Tariff 
a section — No. XVIII — imder which it 
was possible, by Order in Council, to with- 
draw Protection from a manufactured ar- 
ticle that was in control of a Trust ; Protec- 
tion was to be withdrawn only when a Trust 
'unduly' enhanced prices, or in any other 
way 'unduly' promoted the advantage of 
manufacturers or dealers, at the expense of 
consumers. 

"But the Section was so guardedly framed 
as regards its operation, that it might well 
have been drafted by counsel for the Trusts. 
The initial processes were roundabout, and 
procedure, as a whole, was extremely costly. 
As a consequence, Section XVIII was put 
into service only once. This was in 1901, 
when newspaper publishers, at great ex- 
pense, satisfied a Court that there was a com- 
bination of paper manufacturers which had 
'unduly' enhanced prices, and had long ex- 
ploited the publishing industry to the last 
degree of its Tariff Protection. 

"In 1910 there was still another Act to re- 

[ 171 ] 



APPENDIX A 

strain tariff-buttressed trusts from pushing 
their statutory protection against all out- 
side competition to its extreme limit ; it was 
passed at the instance of the Liberal Govern- 
ment that was responsible in 1907 for the 
highest Protectionist tariff ever enacted 
in any part of the British Empire since the 
end of the old commercial system in 1846. 

"The Anti-Trust Act of 1910 amended 
Section XVIII of the Tariff Act of 1897 
so as to make it a little less difficult, and less 
costly to get a prima facie case against a 
trust before the courts. For thirty years — 
1889-1919 — there have thus been Acts on 
the Statute Book of the Dominion to restrain 
trusts from profiteering under national pol- 
icy tariffs. 

"Trusts in Canada are as notorious as 
trusts in the United States; and compara- 
tively they are quite as numerous. But 
only in one instance — that of the paper 
manufacturers in 1901 — has a trust been 
effectively reached under any of these laws, 
because it 'unduly' increased prices to con- 
sumers. In not a single instance since 1889 
has the tariff protection on a single article 
been withdrawn because the manufacture 
and marketing of an article was controlled 
by a trust. Moreover, judging from the 
[ 172 ] 



APPENDIX A 

official report of a discussion at the last an- 
nual conference of the Canadian Manufac- 
turers' Association, the Paper Trust, that 
was in trouble under Section XVIII in 
1901, is, as regards some lines of its busi- 
ness, as flourishing as it was when its opera- 
tions brought it into conflict with the Anti- 
Trust Law," 



[ 173 ] 



APPENDIX B 

THE HOUSING SITUATION: 
CAUSE AND CURE* 

"The solution of the housing problem of 
the District of Columbia goes to the very 
foundation of the original theory upon 
which the Federal district, 'ten miles 
square/ was created. 

''The fathers planned to build a National 
Capital in an isolated spot, free from local 
influences of commerce and politics, where 
the individuals elected and appointed to 
run the Government could function calmly 
and dispassionately. 

"Every other capital in the world but one 
is located in the metropolis of its country. 
Here it was deliberately determined to get 
away from cities, and have nothing in the 
Capital but the machinery of the National 
Government. 

* An article by Oliver P. Newman, former Chairman of 
the District of Columbia Commission; Washington Times, 
October 21, 1919. 

[ 1^* ] 



i 



APPENDIX B 

''What the originators really had in mind 
was a Federal reservation, like an army post. 
They went so far as to lay down, in the Fed- 
eral Constitution, that Congress should have 
exclusive jurisdiction in the 'ten miles 
square'; meaning that the Government 
should be the exclusive authority, to control 
the District and run it as was best for the 
Government. 

"That was a perfectly sound theory, but it 
was not carried to its logical conclusion. To 
have kept the District a Federal reservation, 
where Congress would always be the un- 
questioned boss, the Government should 
have kept title to the land. 

"when it permitted the land to pass 
into private ownership it took a part- 
ner, and has had to reckon with that 
partner ever since. 

"That's the reason there's a housing prob- 
lem in Washington now — a problem diffi- 
cult of practical solution. Much of the land 
is owned by private individuals who, natu- 
rally and legally, want to make money out 
of it. 

"Because they're trying to make money 
out of it, the average resident of Washing- 
ton finds his rent high and houses and apart- 
ments inadequate. . . . 

[ 175 ] 



APPENDIX B 

''If times were normal, I would say that a 
proper system of taxation, whereby a man 
would not be penalized for improving his 
property and whereby the public should re- 
ceive in taxes the value which the public 
creates, would solve the problem — would 
automatically produce houses for as many 
people as needed them at prices within their 
reach. 

"But times are NOT normal, and at such 
periods the Government and not the individ- 
ual should bear the bulk of the burden. The 
law of supply and demand must be forgot- 
ten. 

"The theory that the Government should 
not interfere with private enterprise must be 
abandoned. The idea that, if Uncle Sam 
goes into private business, he must make 
money out of it, must be passed by. This 
must be remembered and observed: 

"the thousands or people here in 

WASHINGTON, MANY OF THEM DOING THE 
WORK OF THE GOVERNMENT, MUST HAVE A 
HEALTHFUL PLACE TO LIVE WITHIN THE 
LIMITS OF THEIR ABILITY TO PAY. 

"In the present emergency I can see but 

one solution. That is for Government to go 

right out, frankly and on a big scale, and 

build houses and apartments, and rent them 

[ 176 ] 



1 



APPENDIX B 

at reasonable rates, even if such action in- 
volves financial loss. 

''There aren't enough houses and apart- 
ments in town. 

''The individual can't aford to build, buy, 
or pay the rents that new property, privately 
owned, must have. 

"Private enterprise probably won't pro- 
vide enough space, anyway, even at high 
rentals. 

"Is there any answer except for Govern- 
ment to step in and do the job?" 



[ 177 ] 



APPENDIX C 

A SOLUTION OF THE HOUSING 

PROBLEM IN THE 

UNITED STATES^ 

BY MILO HASTINGS 

Part I. The Social Problem 

The housing plan here offered has 
obvious kinship with the English garden 
city. It is differentiated from the English 
plan to adapt it more closely to American 
conditions and needs. 

The American possesses no overwhelming 
fondness for ancient and established forms 
of dwelling architecture. If, in our house- 
building and community-planning, any 
practical comforts and modern conveniences 
be sacrificed to the ancient European cults 
of rustic beauty, the American tenant is 
going to repudiate our efforts as mere ar- 
tistic foolery. 

* One of the prize-winning theses in the competition 
Instituted jointly by the Journal of the American Insti' 
tute of Architects and the Ladies' Home Journal, 

[ 178 ] 



APPENDIX C 

The American does possess a contrasting 
fondness for labor-saving inventions and 
"modern improvements," and places a value 
thereon out of all keeping with European 
standards. He wants things up-to-date, and 
is willing to pay for modern features of 
housing conveniences and comforts out of 
all proportion to their actual cost. In the 
Flagg workingmen's apartments, in New 
York, the belated installations of baths per- 
mitted a raising of the rents on a scale that 
paid a hundred per cent on the cost of their 
installation. 

Nor do American working folk, and par- 
ticularly the women, take kindly to those 
ancient ideals of thrift and economy that, 
in song and story, hover about the lowly 
peasant's cot. They want neither cot nor 
cottages, but houses and bungalows. They 
do not want to carry market baskets nor sit 
before open fires. They like to get out and 
travel and go to shows. They want an auto 
and a garage; they want hot water and 
steam heat, a telephone and goods delivered 
— preferably "in the rear." 

Since the American scale of values is dif- 
ferent, we should translate the lessons that 
Europe has to teach us into American 
terms, and plan our housing so as to give 

[ 179 ] 



APPENDIX C 

the American the greatest possible meas- 
ure of those things he wants and is willing to 
pay for. 

The American does want a private house 
and suburban or country life; but he also 
wants city conveniences. As things now 
stand, it is difficult to give him both at a 
price he can pay. Our problem is to devise 
a plan that will give the worker a private 
house and garden, together with cooperative 
utilities and services, and at a total cost 
within his means. 

This is an end that cannot be attained 
without some sacrifice of the picturesque 
freedom of the plotting of the present con- 
ventional garden city. There is no intent 
here to discard the esthetic values of artistic 
irregularity, but only to compromise the 
ideals of the landscapist with the practical 
limitations of the engineer. 

A Street That Functions Efficiently 

The varied ends sought, and proportioned 
to American tastes, can be most economi- 
cally secured by building a series of detached 
houses along a line of service utilities. Our 
present street is such a line, but it is not an 
efficient line. If it be narrow, or the houses 
[ 180 ] 



APPENDIX C 

be set too near the street, it is cramped and 
ugly. If it be wide and spacious, and the 
houses set well back, it is unduly expensive, 
and the total amount of pavement and total 
length of digging and piping to carry the 
utilities into the house is too great. 

We can gain economy by a specialization 
of the functions of the street. We can 
broaden the street that is to be the front of 
the house until it is no longer a street but a 
parkway. We can concentrate the heavy 
traffic and service utilities at the rear of the 
house until it narrows down to the one-way 
vehicle track made of two concrete rails with 
concave surfaces fitted to the gage of an 
ordinary motor vehicle. The construction 
of this "auto railroad" will require but a 
small part of the material needed for the 
modern street, yet the service rendered will 
be more efficient. 

Paralleling this track, and constructed as 
a part of it, will be the line of service-pipes 
and cables. The minimum list will include 
the water-line, the sewer, gas, telephone, 
and the light and power circuit. The sewer 
must be buried in the ground and sloped for 
gravity flow. Water-pipes must be buried, 
not only to prevent freezing but to cool the 
water in summer. Where no heating-line 

[ 181 ] 



APPENDIX C 

is to be provided, it may also be necessary 
to bury the gas-pipes to keep the collected 
water from freezing. The wire cables may 
be located in a groove on the side of the con- 
crete rail, and so be more available. But if 
central heat is to be provided, a conduit 
made of sections of asphalted concrete boxes 
may be placed above the ground-level. By 
this plan it will be possible to keep insula- 
tion dry and there will be less heat lost to 
the air than to the better conductor, the 
damp ground. Where such a surface con- 
duit is used, all pipes and wires, except 
water and sewage, may be carried therein. 
This heat-carrying conduit will pass just 
beneath the floor at the rear of the house, 
and, if there be a garage, the heating con- 
duit may also pass through it just inside the 
rear wall. Thus, the heat radiation from the 
main will not be wholly wasted. 

Rear Streets versus Front Streets 

This compact service-way should be lo- 
cated at the immediate rear of the houses and 
the houses aligned thereto. This line need 
not be rigidly straight, but it should avoid 
unnecessary windings and sharp turns. 
While rigidity of alignment in the rear is 
[ 182 ] 



APPENDIX C 

essential to efficiency, in the front there is 
no rigid house alignment. We avoid the 
straight and narrow way of the city street, 
not by winding and curving it, but by sub- 
stituting for the street a sufficiently wide 
parkway to permit of variations within it- 
self. 

The rear service-line is for utility traffic. 
It makes direct contact with the rear room 
of the house. Here all goods may be de- 
livered into a trap or chute without the de- 
liveryman alighting from his car — often 
without his stopping. Garbage and waste 
paper, set out through a wall-trap, are col- 
lected with like dispatch. The car on such 
a track needs no guidance, hence the extra 
man now often required may be dispensed 
with. Such superior delivery to the house, 
in addition to the direct economy, will stimu- 
late all manner of cooperative effort. Func- 
tions like baking and laundering should, in 
such a community, become completely cen- 
tralized. 

The cormnunity kitchen, which has made 
great strides during the war, requires only 
a more efficient system of house-delivery to 
make it a permanent service in the industrial 
community. 

With all modem utilities in the home and 
[ 183 ] 



APPENDIX C 

this aid toward the centralization of the few 
remaining functions of housekeeping, wo- 
men will be so freed from home labor as to 
greatly increase their capacities for indus- 
trial labor outside the home* While wo- 
man's participation in industry is not 
without its evils, the nation must find other 
ways of correcting these evils than by re- 
fusing to accept labor-saving methods of 
lightening household drudgery. Opposing 
the centralization of housekeeping func- 
tions is quite as stupid as the opposition 
once shown to linotypes and grain-binders. 

This tradeway or service-road is not for 
beauty but for utility. By making it vir- 
tually an automobile railway, speed and ser- 
vice will be enhanced. By more efficient 
transportation for goods, we make possible 
a greater decentralization of population and 
gain access to a greater area of land for 
recreation and cultivation. 

As we cannot have service without an in- 
trusive proximity to the dwelling, we want 
this service concentrated so that it can be 
better hidden. The rear of the house, and 
often a garage, together with a garden- 
house and tool-shed, will half enclose this 
line. We have but to connect up these build- 
ings with a few concrete posts, stretch a 
[ 184 ] 



II 



APPENDIX C 

substantial woven-wire mesh, and plant 
climbing vines, and our service right of way- 
is fenced off as securely as an English rail- 
way. The house door into the traffic-way, 
required only for the delivery of large 
articles, can be kept bolted from the out- 
side. Thus child-life will be safeguarded 
and speed may be unrestricted. Access to 
the garden lands in the rear would be by 
means of a platform extending from an 
upper porch out over the narrow service-way 
and an outer stairway descending into the 
garden space beyond. 

Gardens, Parks, and Play-Spaces 

For commuting suburbanites or industrial 
workers, the garden-patches should not be 
fenced. A narrow strip near the house may 
be reserved for outbuildings and for a few 
fruit trees or perennial crops, like aspara- 
gus. Leaving the remainder of the garden 
land unfenced will permit of economical 
cooperative plowing. Division lines may 
be determined by sighting through between 
landmarks, and thus wasteful and weed- 
breeding f encerows may be avoided. Where 
the holdings are of larger size, a nearby 
strip can be left for cooperative plowing 
and the land beyond fenced for chicken- 
[ 185 ] 



APPENDIX C 

yards and cow-lots. In such developments, 
many tenants would require the smaller gar- 
den holding only, and the larger space be- 
yond could be leased to those desiring them. 

As the concentration of houses on the 
service-line is essential to gain cooperative 
utilities, so the extension of the land in the 
opposite direction will gain greater areas for 
cultivation. 

Our logical housing unit will be formed 
of two approximately parallel lines of 
houses. Connected at its outer end by the 
return bend of the service-line, the unit will 
form a U. At the open end of this U is the 
established city, or, if all things are to be 
new, the industrial and trading area of the 
new city. The inside of the U will be parked 
throughout and traversed by no heavy ser- 
vice traffic but only by such walks and light 
roads as are needed for recreational pur- 
poses and private cars. 

Within this U, with its park-like and non- 
commercial environs, may be located schools, 
clubs, athletic courts, and other social and 
recreational institutions. But the social 
value of this land will not depend upon its 
elaborate equipment; its primary purpose 
is to give a sense of room and freedom and 
to provide ample play-space for children. 
[ 186 ] 



APPENDIX C 

If it be nothing more than an alternation of 
groves and grass lands, with an occasional 
school, it will well serve its purpose of giving 
the residents a free recreational common, 
which is often absent, even in suburbs where 
all land except the street is fenced off as pri- 
vate grounds. 

The length of this U is indefinite. Where 
the land is available for possible later ex- 
pansion, the outer end of the U should not 
be built up with houses, but should merely 
carry the service-way and utility pipes 
which may be moved further out in case of 
expansion. 

Economies in Construction 

The construction of the houses themselves, 
being planned and built in considerable 
numbers, will gain the economies due to 
wholesale building operations. In the re- 
cent Australian rural communities these 
wholesale economies are reported to have 
reduced the housing costs to one-half that of 
individually built houses. In the present 
plan, the cooperative utilities will necessi- 
tate a standardizing of heating equipment 
and similar fixtures that will show the usual 
economies of standardization. Our prog- 
[ 187 ] 



APPENDIX C 

ress in pouring cement houses indicates 
further possibilities of economy. Such econ- 
omies necessitate similarity in the finished 
houses. We accept similarity in automo- 
biles because of economies, and there is no 
reason why we should not accept it in 
houses. But if the whole effect of the house 
and its environs is cramped, monotonous, 
and ugly, we can pay too great a price for 
economy. The solution is to accept a larger 
degree of repetition in house design and 
fittings where the economies are greatest, 
and to secure a compensating variety and 
beauty by the freer use of land in the 
parkway. 

Decentralization of Population 

In the model English garden city of 
Letchworth there is a population of 35,000 
on 4,500 acres, or about two-thirds of an 
acre per family. And yet, in Letchworth, 
twelve houses are permitted per acre, which, 
with a lot 150 feet in depth, would mean 
only 24 feet in lot-width. In this much- 
famed English model, the cramping of 
houses is thus permitted in the town, which 
is then surrounded with a belt of muni- 
cipally owned farms. The outermost acre 
[ 188 ] 



APPENDIX C 

of Letchworth is only several miles from 
the city center. Such a distance can be ne- 
gotiated by a jitney bus in ten minutes at a 
cost of two or three cents per passenger. 

We can well afford to discard this Letch- 
worth farm-belt and distribute our people 
over the whole of our land. After allowing 
for the space for industrial needs, we will 
have a land area a little better than a half an 
acre per family. This must be proportioned 
between the park space, the building and pri- 
vate yard, and the garden space in the rear. 
The houses on the two sides of the U con- 
tribute equally of their allotted space to the 
central parkway, which should be at least 
200 feet wide. Allow another hundred feet 
for the private lawn and house-site and 200 
feet for the garden. The total depth is thus 
400 feet, which will result in a lot-width of 
60 feet. 

Central Heat and Hot Water 

This is a far greater decentralization than 
is gained in the English garden city, yet in 
order to have central heat for every house, 
we have only to provide 60 feet of heating 
main. We have not done this thing, but the 
reasons are not found in the textbooks of 
[ 189 ] 



APPENDIX C 

our heating engineers, but merely in our un- 
social planning. The distribution of heat 
and of hot water for bath and kitchen use 
may be combined. Such water could be 
rapidly circulated by pumps and the pres- 
sure kept up, if need be, by a relay of elec- 
trically driven centrifugal pumps out on the 
line. The cost of power for such forced cir- 
culation should be more than met by the 
economies in coal cost from more efficient 
heating at the central plant, and thus yield 
as a net gain the advantages of the cleanli- 
ness and comfort secured and of labor saved 
by a hot-water supply and the hot-water 
heat within the home. 

The original cost of our conduit and its 
piped utilities will be offset by the elimina- 
tion of individual house-heating systems and 
the saving of the cost of a cellar beneath the 
house. The present uses of the cellar or 
basement are for the location of a heating 
plant, for a place for keeping food cool in 
summer or to prevent its freezing in winter, 
and, in some modern cottages, as a location 
for the laundry. In the present plan none of 
these needs appear. 

Where heat may be piped, so can any- 
thing else that flows by pipe or wire. Sixty 
feet of vacuum pipe will cost less than an 
[ 190 ] 



APPENDIX C 

individual vacuum sweeper. Why should 
the worker's wife sweep with a broom and 
dust with turkey feathers when the expendi- 
ture of a few cents a month for electric 
energy will save her an hour of work a day 
and rid the house of dust-carrying disease 
germs? Again I am constrained to believe 
our nineteenth century sociology and not 
our twentieth century engineering is at fault. 
Why should we go on building workers' 
houses with a hot-water tank on a kitchen 
range and put bathing on an uncertain 
schedule? — for men will bathe where hot 
water is always on tap and will not where 
they have to go down in the kitchen and fire 
up and wait an hour in order to get a hot 
bath. Why should we pile up the responsi- 
bilities and labor of decent living when it is 
cheaper and easier to make living easy? 

We always approach this problem of 
housing from the standpoint of an eleventh- 
hour rush to get roofs over the heads of a 
multitude of workers that the sudden growth 
of some great factory has herded into in- 
suiScient quarters. For such needs, a scale 
of density of population like that of the 
garden city is as near what we want as we 
can now determine it. But, as our social 
control over industry grows more intelli- 

[ 191 ] 



APPENDIX C 

gent, we will cease to let these huge fac- 
tories dictate the density of our living and 
begrudge us more than this arbitrary mini- 
mum of soil. 

The Workman and the Land 

We have a presentiment — and all Uto- 
pians that ever wrote have strengthened it 
— that in the future more of us are going 
to possess land-holdings somewhere between 
the 160-acre farm and the J-acre garden, and 
that agriculture and industry will be more 
closely interwoven than now. Time and in- 
telligence now at work will surely intensify 
agriculture and teach us to grow more food 
from less land ; improved transportation will 
bring us closer together in minutes and in 
dollars, though farther apart in miles; the 
distribution of social utilities will make life 
comfortable, though removed from the city 
throngs. 

To accomplish these ends more speedily, 
we must concentrate our houses on a line to 
gain the advantages of better transporta- 
tion and more cooperative utilities, and ex- 
tend our land back in strips at right angles 
from the line of houses to gain access to 
more soil. The maximum of house con- 
centration is the continuous house of the 
[ 192 ] 



APPENDIX C 

Chambless Roadtown plan ; the minimum is 
the present arrangement of farm-houses. 

There is no absolute standard for the de- 
termination of compromises between these 
extremes, but the range included by the plan 
here offered (the essential idea of which the 
writer published in 1909) is that beginning 
with the detached house and ending with the 
distance at which it ceases to be feasible to 
pipe water. Between these extremes I be- 
lieve may be found the most acceptable and 
economical housing plans for industrial pop- 
ulation in areas where it is feasible to pro- 
vide gardens, and also for those intensive 
agricultural communities where vegetable, 
fruit, and poultry farming are the chief in- 
dustries. Within this range of population 
density will be included the equivalent of 
our present suburban and village life and 
all of our plans for agricultural holdings in 
industrial regions. As we repudiate our 
present congested metropolitan life, and -as 
the wastful processes of extensive agricul- 
ture are restricted, this middle ground in the 
ratio of men to land may come to include 
a major portion of our whole people. 

Picture now our plan applied to a semi- 
agricultural development with holdings of 
from 2 to 10 acres. The houses can be spaced 
[ 193 ] 



APPENDIX C 

from 100 feet to 100 yards apart. We shall 
cease to fence in our tradeway and shall 
probably lose our piped heat and vacuum, 
but we can retain a superior delivery ser- 
vice and our electricity, gas, and water — 
perhaps the latter with enough capacity for 
garden irrigation. 

Our little lands will extend for 1,000 feet 
or so to the rear. The residents who are 
otherwise engaged will retain only a nearby 
garden-patch and sublet the rear portion 
of their holdings to land-loving neighbors. 
If our community has retained the U forma- 
tion, there will be from fifty to a hundred 
families to the mile, and we may have good 
schools, social clubs, and cooperative recrea- 
tional facilities. With auto bus service our 
people may go 5 to 10 miles to work or to 
trade with no undue expense or loss of time. 

But this last picture need not mark the 
maximum of decentralization. We can give 
up the central parkway, combine our pipe- 
and transit-way with the free vehicle road, 
and alternate our houses on the opposite 
sides, place them 100 yards apart, and carry 
our tilled lands back a mile, and our mead- 
ows, small grains, and pastures another 
mile, and we will have an average farm size 
of 600 feet by 2 miles or 150 acres, which is 

[ 194 ] 



APPENDIX C 

entirely too much for the farmer of the fu- 
ture. Far from being inefficient, the long 
field of such a farm would be better adapted 
to economical cultivation than the square 
field, for less time and space are wasted at 
turns. The square survey of American 
farms is unadapted to an age when the de- 
livery truck, the pipe-line, and the power 
wire mean more to men than the vaunted 
isolation of feudal castle or plantation home. 
By applying our principle of the line con- 
centration of living to our farm-survey, we 
would secure, economically, good roads, elec- 
tric light, rural delivery of goods from city 
stores, a bus line, water, sewerage, and gas 
to cook with if we want it, and neighbors 
just out of earshot. 

So much to show that there is really no 
limit to the application of the principle, but 
the immediately practical application is not 
to general farming, except, perhaps, to 
newly reclaimed lands. The most urgent 
need for housing is for our industrial 
workers ; and our aim should be to give them 
as much land as they will use, and give them 
also a detached and private dwelling, and 
yet deny them none of the utilities avail- 
able in apartment or flat. 

There is a time, on Sunday afternoons, 
[ 195 ] 



APPENDIX C 

when we appreciate curved drives and wind- 
ing paths, and for our play-place and play- 
time we set aside the parkway in front of 
our houses, but, in building the houses and 
supplying them with service, mere beauty 
must compromise with efficiency. The aris- 
tocrat lives fronting on the park and has all 
goods delivered in the rear, and so can the 
democrat if he will quit being an anarchist 
in his town-making and house-building. 

Part II. The Economic Method 
The Menace of Landlordism* 

Our existing system of American land- 
tenure grew out of our plan of turning over 
our public domain on easy terms to land- 
owning farmers. By so doing we thought 
to establish a sound and enduring demo- 
cratic tenure. The result of this system, in 
its present state of evolution, is that the 
modest fortunes of a large portion of our 
people are founded on the unearned incre- 
ment from the rise in the price of real estate, 
and hence it is extremely difficult for us as 

* For the statistics covering the growth of landlordism, 
and the diminution of home ownership in the United 
States, the reader is referred to "The Housing Problem 
in War and In Peace," published by the Journal of the 
A. I. A. 

[ 196 ] 



APPENDIX C 

a democratic people to now repudiate the 
system. 

But our much-lauded and fondly wor- 
shipped land-tenure system is not an endur- 
ing one. It is the favorite criticism of mis- 
understood socialism that if we divided the 
world's wealth equally today it would be un- 
equally divided by tomorrow night. That 
is what is happening to our American land 
system, for our intended democracy of pri- 
vate ownership, founded on homesteading, 
is gradually but surely being lost through 
the irregularities of inheritance, the rise and 
fall of fortune, the increase in land-values 
and the big fish eating up the little ones. 
Landlordism and tenantry is the sure but 
inevitable outcome. 

We boast that our own democracy means, 
not equality, but equality of opportunity. 
But there can be no equality of opportunity 
for the new-born in a nation where lands are 
no longer free and where a portion of the 
population live off of the socially created 
rental values of land. 

Government Control Necessary to Prevent 
Congestion and Slums 

We can go on dodging the issue and leav- 
ing the disinherited unborn to right it as they 
[ 19T ] 



APPENDIX C 

may. But while we may not be ready to 
apply a land reform to our general farm 
holdings, the time is at hand when the land 
speculator can no longer be allowed to con- 
gest our cities and absorb the surplus earn- 
ings of our workers by the increment of land 
rentals. If we would extend towns and 
cities or build new communities on a socially 
conscious plan, there is no use going about 
the business except on some basis of federal, 
state, municipal or community land owner- 
ship which will save for the community the 
wealth the community will create. 

Under the urge of war, England, goaded 
by a land situation worse than our own, 
achieved a sudden radicalism which goes 
further than we may desire to go. The land 
for English industrial war towns was not 
only condemned at pre-war prices by the 
Government, but provision was made that 
adjacent lands might thereafter be con- 
demned at pre-war prices. A fairer plan 
would be to give the public agencies active 
in housing enterprises the right to condemn 
the lands needed at present values, and the 
right to condemn further lands when the 
need arises at values to be determined by 
their worth at the time the project was 
founded, plus such ratio of increment in 
[ 198 ] 



APPENDIX C 

value as the regional or state records show 
as having accrued in lands of similar type 
but not effected by proximity to industrial 
communities. 

Who Shall Build Our New Communities? 

But we must not only decide what to do 
but who is to do it. Town-planning by in- 
dividual private enterprise is ruled out be- 
cause it breeds congestion and slums. Town- 
planning by private development companies 
may be fairly satisfactory for the middle- 
class suburbanites, but it has utterly failed 
to properly house our workers. Town- 
building by industrial corporations, who are 
forced into such enterprises by the necessity 
of housing their workers, is somewhat more 
efficient and is the prevailing method in 
present-day building. Such corporations 
employ the best of our town-planners and 
small-house architects, and these men work 
from the employer's point of view. Comfort 
and efficiency for labor they consider. But 
to build up communities wherein the land- 
lord and employer are one and the same cor- 
poration is to accentuate and perpetuate our 
present overgrown industrial feudalism. De- 
mocracy will not thrive in these corporation 

[ 199 ] 



APPENDIX C 

towns where the water from the taps and 
from the eaves is flavored alike with steel or 
rubber, or shredded wheat biscuits, or a cer- 
tain brand of soap. 

But somebody must be the landlord; if 
not the private speculator or the industrial 
corporation, then it must be the government. 
But what government? Federal, perhaps; 
state maybe; best of all, the local govern- 
ment of the district. The community should 
own itself. The unearned increment must 
pour into some pocket, and if it be the pocket 
of the community, then taxes may be deleted 
and the community enriched beyond the 
dreams of publicans. 

For the expansion of existing municipali- 
ties, the right of the eminent domain of the 
city must be extended, not only to its streets 
and rails, its pipes and wires, but to its 
houses, yards, and gardens. Nor should 
this expanded right of domain be confined 
by existing corporation limits. If we would 
solve the house problem, we cannot wait 
until the adjacent rural region becomes half 
urban; we must have power to reach out 
into rural territory and do our planning and 
start our building on fresh ground before 
private suburban development ruins all hope 
of doing it well. 

[ 200 ] 



APPENDIX C 

The Need for Broad Planning Programs 

The sharp political line of demarcation 
between city and country is a serious diffi- 
culty in the development of semi-rural com- 
munities. No such line exists in the nature 
of social or industrial life. As it is at the 
very point where town meets country that 
our greatest opportunity exists, we will need 
some well-wrought plan of cooperation be- 
tween the municipal and the adjacent rural 
government. Such developments cannot 
always be left to mutually jealous local gov- 
ernments, but will require oversight by the 
state to permit of harmonious town- and 
country-planning. In such localities it may 
prove necessary to create new communities 
occupying a portion of both the old city and 
adjacent rural territory. Such areas might 
be incorporated in the old city, with local 
autonomy in the business of land proprietor- 
ship and housing control. 

Our government authorization of an emi- 
nent domain for housing must also be ex- 
tended to new communities that may be cre- 
ated apart from existing cities. For the in- 
itiation of such new efforts we cannot depend 
upon the initiative of centralized govern- 
mental authority. The initiative is more 
[ 201 ] 



APPENDIX C 

likely to come from enterprising citizens or 
industrial leaders. But the overseeing gov- 
ernment must have power to check and su- 
pervise such ambitious efforts. As the 
Reclamation Service now selects from 
among endless local claimants the regions to 
be improved and made into farms, so we 
must have a state or national agency which 
will pass upon new town projects and ex- 
tend authority where worth is found. 

Money and Credit 

In securing the funds for building we will 
have a like need of such aid from the larger 
political organization. In the reclamation 
projects, the acquisition of the land is the 
smaller half of the problem. The Govern- 
ment finances the improvements and se- 
cures the return of the funds invested from 
the wealth thereby created. In like manner, 
the nation or state must finance the public 
utilities and workers' dwellings of new indus- 
trial communities or we will make slow 
progress with our housing problems. 

This is a safe investment for Government 

credit. To issue Government bonds to drain 

swamps or build cities is not to pile up debts 

like those of war, but is merely a govern- 

[ 202 ] 



APPENDIX C 

mentally directed cooperative investment in 
real estate securities. Private capitalists 
would otherwise finance these ventures on 
speculation — some to make and some to 
lose. Through the agencies of Government 
credit, individuals pool their capital, their 
gains and losses, so that all will make 4 per 
cent. As long as we need houses to make 
our workers productive, bonding the Gov- 
ernment to pay for these houses means add- 
ing to national prosperity. 

Self-owning Communities 

The land bought, and the houses built by 
Government funds will be owned by the 
community, the Government holding the 
mortgage. Before the war we would prob- 
ably have sold out the homes to the workers 
on easy payments and so made trouble for 
the next generation. But the war has in- 
creased our social reach into the future, and 
we can now advocate a permanent commu- 
nity ownership. The Government bonds 
may be retired in twenty or fifty years — 
the time is not particular, though the com- 
munity should take the ultimate risk of its 
own life or death, for it is the community 
that will be responsible. 
[ 203 ] 



APPENDIX C 

The community will own itself and will 
rent its houses on long-time or indefinite 
leases to its citizens. The rent figure will 
include interest on the cost, the upkeep, and 
operation of the town as a whole, and, until 
the bonds are retired, the sinking fund for 
such retirement. The citizen will own his 
own home for all the practical purposes of 
vine and fig tree, and, if you please, of an 
ancestral estate. The most prickly thorns on 
the rose of inheritance are removed when we 
do away with private property in the un- 
earned increment. 

Whatever be the relations worked out be- 
tween our complex national, state, city and 
community organizations, the new commu- 
nities that are based on the community own- 
ership of land and houses should have the 
largest possible degree of local autonomy. 
The political problems of such a community 
are different from those existing under the 
old system of land tenure, and the affairs of 
such communities are not likely to be fairly 
administered by outside ofiicials influenced 
by the old system. The new communities 
will form centers of a more social demo- 
cratic life. If they prove efficient they will 
grow and expand, and so they in time recast 
the social structure of the whole nation. 
[ 204 ] 



APPENDIX C 

Present danger lies in subjecting them too 
closely to outside paternalistic influence and 
thus checkmating their opportunity to prove 
their actual worth in competition with the 
old system based on the private ownership 
of land. 

[Note. — Among other references, the reader's atten- 
tion is called to the new Housing Bill in Canada, a sum- 
mary of which appears in this issue; to the new Housing 
Law in Australia, likewise summarized in this number, and 
to the pending law in England, of which many references 
have been published in previous issues of the Journal. The 
English Law is not yet on the statute books, and it is gen- 
erally conceded that it will be wholly ineffective in meeting 
the present grave crisis, unless it be accompanied by a Land 
Acquisition Act that will permit the taking of land at its 
pre-war value, and not compel the Local Authorities to buy 
it at its present greatly inflated value. Editor.] 



[ 205 ] 



APPENDIX D 

A SOLUTION OF THE HOUSING 

PROBLEM IN THE 

UNITED STATES* 

BY ROBERT ANDERSOJN POPE 

I. The Social Purpose 

Of the innumerable grand projects for 
human betterment that have witnessed man's 
resolute faith in his own future, the larger 
number have never attained realization. 
Their main substance was a generous imagi- 
nation, their chief animus a high-spirited 
altruism. Detached from the basic facts of 
the nature of mankind, and unrelated to 
other projects of reform, they have remained 
for the most part, inspiring ideals — chiefly 
potent in keeping alive man's discontent 
and aspiration. Through this experience 
we have become too fearful of fundamental 
reforms and yet it is only through funda- 

* One of the two prize-winning theses in the competition 
for a solution of the housing problem in the United States, 
as conducted by the Journal of the American Institute of 
Architects and the Ladies' Home Journal, 

[ 206 ] 



APPENDIX D 

mental reforms that we shall produce the 
realization of our aims. 

There are no facts in creation so real and 
important as the facts related to human na- 
ture; although, like the air we breathe, we 
are unconscious of them, nevertheless they 
are constantly and powerfully operative. If 
respected and capitalized, they will prodi- 
giously reinforce any enterprise ; if promised 
satisfaction and fulfillment, they will ensure 
success. They reckon ill who neglect them. 
External power or material glory is never 
safe if these forces, which make up the in- 
herent qualities of mankind, are placated 
and unemployed. 

It is, then, the fundamental and universal 
nature of man himself which must control 
every successful enterprise of human well- 
being, and we must therefore acknowledge 
the authority of man's deepest needs and 
capacities, and, in the light of the essential 
characteristics of human nature, attempt 
to provide that setting which will insure 
the development of an ample and humane 
life. This is primarily the field of the phil- 
osopher and the psychologist, and the essen- 
tial character of human nature, in its major 
outlines, has already been made clear and 
sure by philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, 
[ 207 ] 



APPENDIX D 

and Kant, down to the modern psycholo- 
gists of the Freudian school ; and it is upon 
their conclusions, then, that we intend to 
base and draw up herein our new Bill of 
Rights. 

Man is an animal and on the bodily basis 
rests all chance for a really satisfactory life. 
The barest physical necessities of man's 
system call for air, light, protection, space 
for movement, opportunities for cleanliness, 
and so forth. There is no possibility of men 
being really themselves except in a friendly 
physical environment that promotes a 
healthy, normal, communal life. Though 
in fact the proposition is too trite to be 
argued, the force and authority of it are 
often overlooked — and overtly this essen- 
tial right has been and is daily outraged on 
a vast scale. The medieval and puritanical 
scorn of the physical life has been a profit- 
able dogma for the exploiter, and a so-called 
Christian civilization, motivated by a con- 
cern for individual profit, and the obligation 
of a world to come, have permitted endless 
abuse of man's right as a physical being. 

Although it is true that man is an animal, 

he is something more; and the cry that man 

shall not live by bread alone is a recognition 

of the truth that only in the fulfillment of 

[ 208 ] 



APPENDIX D 

his mental and spiritual functions can man 
find the good life. 

The most universal character of normal 
mental process is the effort towards inte- 
gration. We give things names, we regis- 
ter impressions, we seek to establish 
relations of resemblance, continuity, and 
dependence. We are constantly desig- 
nating, classifying, relating every minute of 
our waking lives — trying vainly, blindly, 
to impart some order and control into the 
sorry scheme of things. That which is un- 
related is mysterious, painful, baffling, and 
even terrifying. The Freudian method of 
research has shown that the lack of the inte- 
grated life is responsible for many of our 
pathological, as well as our psychological, 
disabihties; and that the right life involves 
a complete integration which shall include 
within a harmonious whole man's subcon- 
scious and conscious selves. 

This compelling force of human progress 
is the essential quality of the mind with its 
unconscious, persistent, and universal pres- 
sure in the direction of coherence, order, and 
spirituality. This is the elan vitale. As the 
acorn, by its inherent structure, predeter- 
mines the ultimate character of the oak tree, 
so the elan vitale predetermines the progress 
[ 209 ] 



APPENDIX D 

of society ; and it is that fundamental char- 
acter of the mind and spirit that we must 
recognize as the medium to which it is neces- 
sary to attach all our programs and reforms. 

One of the most important characteristics 
of mankind which this integration must 
recognize is that of the creative impulse 
which is inherent to all men. Probably no 
other factor has been so outraged and denied 
by modern industrialism. The modern 
town must provide some way which, in the 
end, will accomplish the freedom of the 
workers to express this powerful impulse in 
forms of creative achievement. 

Another phase of human need which must 
be recognized is the complexity of man's 
talents. Modern industrialism has disre- 
garded this, to the serious detriment of so- 
ciety, concentrating, as it has, the whole 
energies of a human being on tasks that util- 
ize but a trifling phase of his inherent ca- 
pacities, while leaving the others cramped 
and impoverished. The price of a policy 
which so disregards the varied capacities of 
every individual may be merely a dreary, 
melancholy life for one poor group of 
workers ; or, on the other hand, outraged hu- 
man nature may assert itself, as it has in the 
past and still continues to do, through more 
[ 210 ] 



APPENDIX D 

or less criminal deeds of violence and excite- 
ment. Gambling, drunkenness, sex morbid- 
ity, reckless sabotage, are but some of the 
ways in which a cramped nature is meeting 
this phase of modern industrial life. 

Among the other major inherent charac- 
teristics of mankind for which provision 
must be made are the herd or social instinct, 
the spirit of freedom, the spirit of play, and 
the love of the beautiful. A brief amplifica- 
tion of these characteristics is necessary in 
order to later disclose what town planning 
and housing technique must be devised to 
comply with these fundamental require- 
ments of human nature which we have ac- 
cepted as authoritative for our direction. 

The herd or social instinct is the correla- 
tive of the instinct for self-preservation — 
gregariousness is just as ultimate as acquis- 
itiveness. Man is, indeed, as Aristotle has 
said, preeminently a social being. The in- 
dividual man has value in life only as a social 
complex. From the social whole he has de- 
rived his language, traditions, customs. To 
that he constantly appeals — in cooperation 
alone can he do his work or find his com- 
pletest satisfaction. It is not merely that 
our material existence depends upon society, 
our food, clothing, shelter, education, pro- 
[211 ] 



APPENDIX D 

tection; it is rather that the very quality of 
our minds is social. Solitude is the most 
cruel form of punishment. To be hated is 
almost preferable to being neglected. A hu- 
man being, in so far as he is more than a 
chemical and physical complex, can be de- 
fined only in terms of social relations. He 
has advanced out of wildness and weakness 
by virtue of his infinite capacity for coopera- 
tion, for mutual aid. 

It was this quality which Prince Kropot- 
kin showed to be the dominating surviving 
factor in pre-historic man — a factor which 
involved the substitution of tribal property 
for individual property; and which he tells 
us resulted, in the prehistoric tribe, in a qual- 
ity of life, idyllic in its completeness and 
beauty, and far more Christian than any- 
thing we know of in the world today. 

Without the opportunity for association 
and cooperation, man becomes morbid, mel- 
ancholy, hateful. He needs to give and to 
receive sympathy according to the cosmic 
law of love and self-sacrifice; to share and 
undertake with other human beings all man- 
ner of enterprises and activities. Only in 
social contact can he feel himself a real hu- 
man being or ever quite truly know his own 
character. At the basis of all great societies 
[ 212 ] 



APPENDIX D 

there have been especially close cooperative 
units : The Greek state ; the Hindu caste, and 
ryotwar; the Chinese family; the Japanese 
or Scotch clan; the Russian mir ; the Renais- 
sance cities ; the American state and the New 
England town meetings. 

Civilization has lost most of this fine in- 
herent spirit of cooperation and in its loss 
has paid dearly. The long and brutal fight 
that laborers have had for even free asso- 
ciation is a sad story in the history of hu- 
man oppression. Denied the elemental 
right of free cooperation, it is not surprising 
that, when the long-denied power and ex- 
hilaration that come from association were 
discovered, they were for some time put to 
primitive and imprudent use. From every 
quarter of the globe and every angle of hu- 
man experience comes overwhelming testi- 
mony to the magnetic and irresistible power 
of the spirit of cooperation. The mysterious 
and stubborn persistence of the Bolsheviki 
is due primarily to the fact that they have 
capitalized a vast power in the instinct for 
human brotherhood — a power which a com- 
placent western civilization ignores at its 
peril. It is a vital, universal, essential hu- 
man trait. It demands fulfillment on both 
a large and a small scale. It must not 
[ 213 ] 



APPENDIX D 

merely be vast and mechanical, as a great 
army — it must also be intimate, personal, 
a daily opportunity in all lives. So precious 
is this human value of brotherhood and 
solidity that war has often been defended on 
the ground that, despite its infinite anguish, 
it recovers for a distracted civilization the 
precious unity which an atomistic, scientific 
industrialism has shattered. 

The love of freedom is fully recognized as 
a universal and powerful character of the 
nature of mankind and needs to be stressed 
but little, yet it is so potent that full consid- 
eration must be given to it by the town cre- 
ator. Modern life has imposed upon the 
original flexible human spirit a rigid, me- 
chanical order, itself artificial, and, despite 
man's amazing adaptability, in the long run 
injurious. Time is divided into pieces; we 
stretch our lives on Procrustean beds of 
clocks, calendars, routine, programs, insti- 
tutions — in short, a vast, dispiriting, clank- 
ing machinery compels us at every moment. 
Spontaneity, verve, adventure, imagination 
are held rigid in iron bands so that the mor- 
bid and violent become the only accessible 
substitutes for a free and natural play of 
will and fancy. 

Once released from uncongenial environ- 
[ 214 ] 



APPENDIX D 

ment and all really artificial limitations, the 
human spirit tends to develop along the lines 
of its own well-being. Its ultimate ideals are 
present as driving, animating forces, within 
it at all times, however concealed. They nat- 
urally and powerfully predetermine growth 
in the right direction. This is not senti- 
mental altruism, but facts of biology, his- 
tory, and psychology. We are not arguing 
for dispensing with discipline or training, 
but simply that, if environment is provided 
with that which is at all congruous with 
man's native requirements, his own infinite 
passion for perfection asserts itself — 
slowly perhaps, but triumphantly. Man's 
infinite perfectibility and natural disposi- 
tion to excellence is one of the profoundest 
truths in the universe and the one thing that 
makes any form of slavery outrageous and 
intolerable. 

In accordance with this thesis we must not 
impose a dogmatic scheme upon the future 
town. As we believe in the spirit of free- 
dom, we must provide scope for it. Our 
town must be so planned that social and in- 
dustrial innovations and adjustments are 
both feasible and easy. The town planner 
is only providing the skeleton, the frame- 
work, the technique. Each age must fashion 
[ 215 ] 



APPENDIX D 

its own order of city as well as each people, 
and it must be expressive of their own in- 
terests, adapted to their own needs. At best 
we can give the present order its most so- 
cially helpful community plans by striving 
to escape cramping finality. 

The so-called political freedom which men 
think they have enjoyed has become but the 
sop of industrialism, through which the at- 
tention of the workers has been diverted 
from the fact of the slavery of the wage sys- 
tem. That this situation cannot long ob- 
tain, involving as it does the denial of this 
enormously potent human craving, is evi- 
dent by the world-wide fomenting spirit of 
unrest. This is well understood by thinking 
men everywhere, who know that the conse- 
quences of continued frustration of this hu- 
man need will be measured in the blood and 
turmoil of revolution. But if men arise who 
can lead us to an industrial democracy which 
is a real freedom, then we shall progress by 
the peace of evolution rather than by the 
strife of revolution. 

The town creator can, as will be shown, 
make large contribution to the cause of in- 
dustrial freedom and thereby of peaceful 
evolution, by the technique which he pro- 
vides for this purpose in his town plan. 
[ 216 ] 



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a xiaNaddv 



APPENDIX D 

find the satisfaction which comes from the 
expression of the creative impulse, a satis- 
faction that needs no excess compensation in 
terms of money. Initiated, as the movement 
undoubtedly would be, by the abler leading 
spirits of the community, other men of lesser 
ability and courage would be attracted from 
industry operated for profit to one or an- 
other of the groups which produce commodi- 
ties for the joy of self-expression and from 
which their livelihood would come as a sec- 
ondary and matter-of-course result. 

It is our faith, then, that through some 
such provision of opportunities for indus- 
trial freedom there would develop a rational, 
feasible, logical reincarnation of the old 
guild idea. 

Such an unprecedented concept of indus- 
trial transformation and community devel- 
opment would certainly fail of realization 
were the initial steps of the project not 
guided by the ablest and friendliest of hands. 
It is a well-known fact that causes fail time 
and again from the want of competent 
agents. For such an undertaking, men are 
needed who, by the quality of their minds 
or the evangelical fire of their spirit, pre- 
determine the success of any enterprise to 
which they give themselves. It is such a 
[ 223 ] 



APPENDIX D 

group of men and women who have pro- 
jected the graduate school of social and po- 
litical science, to be located in New York 
City, and who are the type of men and 
women who, by their mental equipment and 
their integrity of social purpose, would in- 
sure the fullest realization of these high pur- 
poses. 

II. The Economic Method 

The most successful medium for the eco- 
nomical development of good towns that has 
yet been made use of is the copartnership 
plan. For nearly fifty years it has been, 
with some slight modifications and improve- 
ment, made use of in the English garden 
cities and villages, and it has accomplished 
those things which the program of this prop- 
osition has suggested as necessary objec- 
tives. By holding all the land of the vil- 
lage collectively, and by leasing instead of 
selling, no opportunity is ever provided for 
speculation in land-value increments. 

Charter provisions in these towns provide 
for a limited number of houses per acre, 
which will effectually and forever prevent 
congestion of habitations. This, however, 
in future towns, must be supplemented by 
an experimental limitation in the floating 
[ 224 ] 



APPENDIX D 

population of a community, the limitation 
being determined, as Socrates has suggested, 
according to Plato, by that size which would 
produce the fullest life and yet have the 
quality of unity. Such a limitation of pop- 
ulation, while it might have some disadvan- 
tages because of its arbitrary nature, will 
have many more advantages, such as, for in- 
stance, making it possible to provide with 
finality all of the social and semi-social pro- 
visions such as schools, libraries, music halls, 
gymnasiums, theatres, markets, and the like. 
With the knowledge of this finality, a higher 
quality and more permanent character of 
structure could be provided for public build- 
ings, public parks, and play-spaces. 

Modifications of the copartnership plan 
have been suggested, perhaps as wartime 
measures, which did not involve having the 
tenant subscribe to tenant shareholders' 
stock. Such an alteration of this plan con- 
flicts with one of its most important social 
aspects, to wit, the making of all tenants 
shareholding partners in the enterprise, and 
cannot advisedly be accepted as a proper 
modification of the copartnership plan. 

When this method of organization is 
made use of, it automatically takes care of 
the question of taxation through the rent 
[ 225 ] 



APPENDIX D 

payment, the taxes being determined by the 
representatives of the tenant and non-tenant 
shareholders. 

The purpose of taxation, however, is to 
assign the just and proportionate share of 
the cost of collective living, and while this 
has been successfully done in places where 
land is not sold by appraising the rental 
values of land, this method is not ideal, since 
excessive rentals tend to be reimposed upon 
the people of a community. 

An alternate form of taxation which it 
would be desirable to experiment with is one 
that would be based upon having all men, 
women, and children in a community give a 
certain percentage of their entire time to 
community work; the percentage being the 
same, such a tax would be equitable and also 
proportionate for himself. Such a provis- 
ion would have the effect of stimulating 
pride in and love for one's own commu- 
nity, since we love most those people and 
those things which we serve most. It may be 
objected that the community might need 
things which the service of members in the 
community could not provide. This would 
be met by allowing payment in amount of 
the equivalent of a man's time, that time 
for which he was taxed by the community, 
[ 226 ] 



APPENDIX D 

although no man should be allowed to sub- 
stitute payment for the entire service tax. 
By such a provision there will never be any 
question of increase in land- value where the 
co-partnership plan is made use of and 
where a broad agricultural and wood- 
land belt of land surrounds a community, 
so as not to give any increase in land- values 
to the contiguous territory — a provision, 
which, as a matter of course, should be made 
for any new town. 

The purpose of government is to accom- 
plish the fullest functioning of the group as 
to its collective material, physical, and spir- 
itual needs, and to provide for itself every 
requisite of the good life which the collective 
efforts would more effectively and benefi- 
cially secure than would individual effort. 
The form of government which would prove 
most democratic, and yet at the same time 
practical, is that of the New England town 
with its town meeting. If the state in which 
the conmiunity exists permits this form, it 
should be made use of in the beginning. The 
ultimate goal as to form of government 
ought to be that which was characteristic 
of the Old World and the guild. Govern- 
ment arose out of a group of men function- 
ing similarly, and it is by our functions 
[ 227 ] 



APPENDIX D 

rather than by more arbitrary methods of 
determining political groups that we should 
determine our government. The heads of 
guilds meet other heads of guilds in the 
Guilds Hall, and since all are consumers of 
each others' products, as well as producers 
of their own products, the community's best 
welfare is automatically insured. But the 
entire purpose of this thesis is to set free 
men so that their natural instincts may be 
allowed to autonomously provide, not alone 
their own form of government and taxation, 
but their entire social and industrial life; 
therefore little importance can be attached 
to the initiative policies since they will be, 
in such a community, eliminated or de- 
veloped according to their merit and fitness 
soon after their inauguration. 

III. The Physical Plan 

This town plan has been designed ac- 
cording to the ideals set forth in the ''Social 
Purpose," wherein the characteristics and 
the nature of man have been set down as the 
proper guiding fundamental consideration. 
The fact that a man is a physical animal is 
recognized in the commonplace, everyday 
provisions of the everyday town. The dis- 
position of these provisions has been made 
[ 228 ] 



APPENDIX D 

in a more unified and economic way. The 
position of the shops, markets, banks, thea- 
tres, apartments, individual and multiple 
houses recognize and provide for this physi- 
cal nature of man. 

Provision for the effort to satisfy that uni- 
versal character of normal mental process 
toward integration has been in part con- 
sidered in the design of the town by the 
unity of its street system and by the fact 
that each block of the town is made a unit 
in itself through the tying effect which the 
community set of buildings, located midway 
in the block, provides. The unity of plan 
which makes for integration is further se- 
cured by the location of the principal shop- 
ping, social, and recreational centers on one 
main axis. It is further amplified by the 
centralization of these functions in orderly 
and logical manner, and again by the seg- 
regation of the manufacturing area from the 
living area, all of which tend to make life 
in this commimity an orderly, harmonious 
whole. 

The provision for the transaction of the 
creative impulse has been made by setting 
aside land and site for groups of workshops 
in which the guild form of industry may 
develop. It is further maintained in the nu- 
[ 229 ] 



APPENDIX D 

merous public buildings, planned for music, 
art, theatricals, and all manner of recrea- 
tional activities, for even in such forms the 
creative impulse finds ways of self-expres- 
sion. The aforementioned considerations of 
the home and community workshop are per- 
haps the most important mediums for the 
satisfaction of this instinct. 

The provision for the herd or social in- 
stinct has perhaps been the most extensive 
of all, not only because it is such an impor- 
tant phase of mankind, but its satisfaction 
is expressed more largely than that of other 
instincts in the material terms of buildings, 
parks, recreational fields, etc., and these are 
fully enumerated and described in the plan. 

The provision for the instinct of freedom 
is most potently expressed in the plan that 
insures a choice between industrial effort for 
profit and industrial effort for self-expres- 
sion. The other provisions for satisfying the 
spirit of freedom are not expressible in the 
plan. 

The spirit of play has been fully met by 
placing at hand, contiguous to the home, 
a park and playgrounds and by providing 
in the outskirts, contiguous to the larger 
schools and the great gymnasiums, generous 
areas for recreation. 

[ 230 ] 



APPENDIX D 

The love of the beautiful has been afforded 
satisfaction in the home itself by the group- 
ing of houses and the open spaces surround- 
ing them, the parks and playgrounds afford- 
ing splendid opportunities for a beautiful 
background of foliage and the play of 
shadow and sunshine. The buildings in the 
social groups are so placed as to insure pic- 
turesqueness and charm, while, in the busi- 
ness center, the charm of order and sym- 
metry is provided for. 

The economic requisites which feasibility 
demands have been met by providing a min- 
imum of street area for a maximum of 
house-frontage perimeter. Streets have 
been minimized by focusing through traffic 
on a few diagonal streets of sufficient di- 
mensions. Economy in pedestrian and ve- 
hicular traffic has been insured by the fo- 
cusing of the diagonals and horizontal streets 
on a series of points rather than upon a 
single point, and everywhere provision has 
been made for one-way traffic. An innova- 
tion, aiming to further facilitate the move- 
ment of traffic, has been introduced by flar- 
ing these diagonals for two blocks, up to 
reaching the point of their objectives. This 
provision means easy accommodations for 
the retardation of traffic which takes place 
[ 231 ] 



APPENDIX D 

at such points and furthermore makes pro- 
vision for the increase of standing traffic. 

By way of facilitating all manner of ex- 
periment in community life, a group of com- 
munity buildings has been provided in the 
center of each block. Herein it is proposed 
that the nursery, the kindergarten, and the 
primary schools will be placed, with pro- 
vision for experiment in community laun- 
dry, sewing-room, kitchen, and dining-room, 
also for reading-room, small library and 
evening school. Herein may develop the 
nucleus which will make democracy a real 
and living thing. 

In this thesis we have considered housing 
and town-planning as of far greater im- 
port when used as a means to a new social 
order than as an end in itself. This we be- 
lieve to be a fundamental and essential atti- 
tude toward the problem in our present-day 
generation when housing has such potent 
promise as a medium to the new order and 
the new day. 

We have claimed a great deal for the re- 
generative power of our housing scheme. 
Beyond all debate, some such undertaking 
is indispensable to the new social order, yet 
it would be contrary to our fundamental 
[ 232 ] 



APPENDIX D 

principles to insist upon it as a cure-alL 
True, it will favor and support every rea- 
sonable reform — it will, of its own excel- 
lence, repair many of the blind cruelties of 
an uncontrolled industrial order — but new 
and sounder methods of education, a 
thoroughgoing application of the new prin- 
ciples of mental hygiene, a strong develop- 
ment of the non-militaristic internation and 
the consequent removal of pressure that sup- 
ports many of the most intolerable features 
of our present social organization — these 
also are necessary, independent, and sup- 
plemental. 



[ 233 ] 



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